I have been fighting with MythTV, trying to get it to play my videos for over a month. I have played with my MythTV compilation settings, tried turning off OpenGL, changing the video profile to “Slim”, recompiling my ATI video drivers, and messing with my X configuration. I finally solved it by deleting the installation and reinstalling:

su -
rm /usr/lib64/libmyth*
rm /usr/bin/myth*
(reinstall mythtv)

This messy post brought to you by the iPhone’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking app thank you very much…

iTunes sucks.  I have much higher ambitions for my own software, but alas I haven’t hit the lottery quite yet.  😛  Anyway, the latest chapter of suckitude is iTunes’ pee-poor handling of remote files on a media file server.  What a $(*#@ basic need.  I can set up a samba share and see all the media files just fine from my MBP laptop.  Then I “Add to library…”, being careful not to copy the GB’s of music down to the laptop by unchecking the iTunes->Preferences->Advanced->[Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library] checkbox.  It takes over an hour to scan the directory (what the HELL), and then iTunes proceeds to lock up my machine, perpetually, trying to perform [Gapless playback detection], even though I have crossfading turned off.  I get to repeat this process every time I add ONE file to my music collection.  Or rather, I don’t, as I refuse to go through ANY of this bullshit ritual.

There was a slight reprieve in the suckitude when I discovered mt-daapd (aka Firefly?), which serves up all your media from a linux fileserver over DAAP, Apple’s sharing protocol.  Wahoo, I’m back to loving you, Apple!  My media server scans regularly, serving up the files with the greatest of ease, and  iTunes is showing all my files under the SHARED tab.  Happy happy joy joy!  Until I try to drag a file to my iPhone.  Strange, it won’t work.  Well, not really strange.  Kind of predictable.  Welcome to the thin Aqua-colored veneer over Apple’s standard corporate behavior.  Puke.

I’m mostly bitter because I certainly should have developed a better way by now.  Shutting up and dusting off the old drawing board…

The MythTV developers are stabilizing the svn trunk at the moment. I’m building it regularly. In gentoo, do this:

sudo emerge -Davu libcdaudio

In my mythtv kernel configuration HOWTO, there are several kernel modules that must be re-emerged after a new kernel is installed. [ivtv] was particularly troublesome, because each version of ivtv only applied to a specific kernel version. To install a new kernel, you’d have to first make sure you could get the right version of [ivtv], typically through version-specific masking (pita), then install the kernel, then re-install [ivtv], hoping you didn’t run into any problems. So it’s a lot easier now that [ivtv] is included in the kernel – just configure it into the kernel and you’re good to go. See gentoo’s [ivtv] web page for details, it’s just starting to get documented. But gentoo packages are all good to go! Yay gentoo!

My git wiki article has been updated. Humming along. If this looks like something you want to do, check it out…

                      repo1
               mybranch<->master
              /                 \
my shared repo                   external svn repo
              \                 /
               mybranch<->master
                      repo2