Last week I finally solved my hardware problems with MythTV 0.22 and a Hauppauge Nova-T PCI card and the TerraTec T-5 double DVB-T receiver.

After many reboots and tests with one or both receivers it turned out that the hardware was not at fault:-/

All I had to do was move the two TerraTec antennas to a spot with better reception, duh!

Before using the TerraTec receiver with my main MythTV server I had tested DVB-T reception on my laptop with the old placement of antennas and reception was fine, however it turns out that the DVB-T signal is quite dependant on weather changes.

So now my only remaining problems is that mythtranscoder doesn't support H.264 encoded streams and MythVideo webpart refuses to work, not using the mythtv hostname but the actual hostname...

Saturday my trusted old Lenovo x61s started emitting strange fan sounds again and like last time it started failing to boot up with the "Fan error" error message. Not saying which fan was at fault, though I suspect it's the usual second fan found on some x61s models. Last time only eight months ago I had to exchange both fans, let's see how it goes this time around. At least I found out that I could still boot by pressing ESC when the error message appears.

I just stumbled across an article in the Danish newspaper Politiken, which give some recommendations about how to create strong passwords, which is all fine. However it also recommends that you test your password with passwordmeter.com (I actually expected something like this before clicking on the article).

At least one good password practice is to not disclose your password to third parties and especially a site like passwordmeter.com which you know nothing about (wouldn't it just be a genious way to collect passwords and origin IP adresses?).

So first thing is to make a whois lookup on the domain:

Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States

I didn't know who Domains by Proxy, Inc are, but just the name certainly make some bells toll. It's definately not a site I want to use to test passwords!

Reports on the web range from describing it as a normal service to a hideout for spammers. Why on earth would any legitimate business want to hide their identity and especially if you want users to type in all of their passwords?

Update: As some of the comments pointed out it actually does everything client side (at least with Konqueror and Firefox), however for the average user it's still bad practice to type in their password on any third party site.

Problems with the capture cards have continued, so in the end I had to unplug my Hauppauge Nova-T PCI card.

Otherwise dmesg would show errors like:

hub 1-0:1.0: port 2 disabled by hub (EMI?), re-enabling...
usb 1-2: USB disconnect, address 2
DiB0070 I2C write failed
DiB0070 I2C read failed

and after the capture cards died, mythbackend would sometimes crash and burn as well

mythbackend[23251] general protection ip:7fdc36c50f48 sp:7fff3a6a8c70 error:0 in libc-2.10.1.so[7fdc36bdb000+153000]
mythbackend[23302]: segfault at 7f1674000000 ip 00007f167c7ea289 sp 00007fff4fbfec40 error 4 in libc-2.10.1.so[7f167c771000+153000]

So I ripped out the Nova-T and settled for two DVB-T tuners for now.

At least the BE was running somewhat stable now and I could once again focus on the FE. Unfortunately most new danish channes were without sound, since MythTV doesn't support HE AAC audio. However this one was easily fixed by just enabling the faad USE-flag.

Worse were the serious stuttering on especially DR Update, which is actually not broadcast in HD. Seems to be these two bugs: MythTV bug #7481 MythTV bug #7522. After applying the corresponding patches found here and here, all channels seems to play properly.

Only odd thing about the frontends is that I somehow managed to mess up the config. If I run FE A and then FE B,FE B will think that recordings and capture cards are local until i delete config.xml. When I start FE A again it's the same problem there.

So now I'm just wondering wether I should build a dedicated FE using Zotac IONITX-D-E or just hack a bit to use my Pop Corn Hour.

Some weeks ago I tried getting MythTV to run in a KVM guest without much luck to say the least. Today I set forth to install MythTV on the KVM host itself and get my Hauppauge Nova-T PCI card and Terratec Cinergy T5 USB stick to work.

This lead me through all kind of troubles and getting all the pieces to work together was not exactly easy. It turned out that the tuners on the PCI card and USB stick worked quite unreliably. At one point actually causing all KVM guests to segfault.

Between a lot of reboots it sometimes appeared that some of the tuners worked and I actually got to mess with XMLTV for Denmark. Somewho the xmltv ebuild doesn't seem to properly support any current grabbers for .dk (or I was blind). Anyway the tv_grab_dk_dr_2009 script seems to work, and support quite a lot of channels.

After getting XMLTV to kind of work I got back to messing with MythTV and discovered that eventhough the mythbackend thought that it was recording, no recordings showed up on disk.

Turns out that dmesg was filled with dib0700 I2C read/write failed errors and w_scan wouldn't find any channels until the system was rebooted. One posting proposed to add a slight delay when changing channels. I rebooted and tried that but still the same, soon the tuners would be unresponsive again. Though this time the errors hadn't completely filled up dmesg so I also found another

error: ehci_hcd 0000:00:13.5: force halt; handhake ffffc90000034024 00004000 00004000 -> -110

That lead me to another posting proposing to use the the slightly older 1.1 firmware (dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw) and setting a few module options. This actually seems to have solved the problem, though the Nova-T card is not able to tune to any channels. Now it can record and I can watch live TV as well. Still there are some minor problems with some of the new Danish channels and the frontend, but now most of basic stuff is finally working.