Upgrading MythTV from 0.22 to 0.23+

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Last spring I made the rather painful (partially corrupt database) upgrade from MythTV 0.21 to 0.22. Now for various reasons I'd like to move to the latest released version - 0.23.1. So there are 3 main questions here...

1 - Has anyone here upgraded past 0.22, and can you share any experiences?

2 - Can I go straight from 0.22 to 0.23.1, or do I have to go from 0.22 to 0.23 then from 0.23 to 0.23.1?

3 - I never did anything with recoring groups - my recordings are all stuffed in /media, though there is an empty Movies directory tree under there. I thought I heard somewhere that recording groups were mandatory beginning with 0.23. Can anyone illuminate?

Now to throw a bone out there for others...

In the old pre-0.22 days there was a package called "nuvexport" that would let you grab MythTV recordings and export them to many other formats, optionally clipping commercials as you went. Gentoo withdrew nuvexport when it withdrew 0.21. (when it withdrew qt3) I've got my own ebuild of nuvexport working with 0.22 - I did a bunch of work with the developer last March. But my stuff works off of a March snapshot of the code, and the developer has moved onward with mainstream MythTV. The other night I got nuvexport running on one of my other machines, which also made me realize that I had to downgrade ffmpeg from 0.6* to 0.5*. But if I want to get ffmpeg and nuvexport better up to date I need to get MythTV better up to date, too. Hence this question.

At any rate, I'm willing to share my nuvexport ebuild and snapshot of the code.
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tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

The upgrade from 0.22 directly to 0.23.1 works just fine. That's what I did a few months ago. MythTV database schema upgrades always do one schema change at a time from the existing schema to the current allowing it to upgrade any number of version changes at once. Now that that awful database encoding thing has been taken care of, database upgrades in all MythTV upgrades should be painless.

When you say recording groups, are you referring to storage groups? I never set up any storage groups myself. However several versions back when storage groups were introduced, the upgrade automatically created a default storage group using the old obsolete recording path entry in the settings:

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

On thing you should be aware of: I notice that you say your recordings go into /media. If that's actually a mount point for a file system, that's a potentially dangerous setup. Here's why:

If for some reason the file system failed to mount at /media, the backend wouldn't know it, because /media would just be an empty directory. The better setup is to have the recordings in a subdirectory below the mountpoint. For example, my mountpoint is /video, but the recordings go into /video/recordings. If that ever failed to mount MythTV would fail immediately because it wouldn't find the directory...and that's what you want to happen. Otherwise it would simply look like all your recordings went away and MythTV would start recording to, and filling up, you / file system.

Just something you might want to address at some point.

Tom

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Yes, my recordings go into /media, and yes it is a mount point.

I'm not at all averse to the idea of using /media/recordings instead, but how do I do that? Can I tell MythTV to migrate content, is it a "start over and reconfigure situation", or is it a "tweak the MySQL database and then move the data to match" type of thing?

Would it be better to do this type of thing before or after moving from 0.22 to 0.23.1? In other words, is one or the other better suited to this type of reconfiguration?
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tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

To be honest, I'm not clear exactly how to change that, as I've never had to do it. I'm sure there's no reason to do so before upgrading. Remember that, although changing that is a good idea, it's not like a failed mount is more than an extremely rare occurrence.

I *think* that all you'd have to do to change it is:

a) Stop the backend.
b) Create the /media/recordings directory.
c) Move the recordings and preview images etc to the new directory.
d) Use mythtv-setup to edit the existing storage group (Default) and change it's path (under Storage Directories).
e) Restart the backend.

Though again...total disclaimer...I not sure on that. I'd check possibly on the mythtv-users list about that. In my recordings table all recordings have a storagegroup of either Default or LiveTV. There is no actual LiveTV entry in the storagegroup table, just the entry for Default, so I'd guess that LiveTV recordings just go in the Default groups location, though I'm not sure.

Tom

Minos · Apprentice Joined: 09 May 2003 Posts: 177

I actually moved my recording directory recently. Here is the process I used:

* Create new directory
* Stop mythbackend
* Add new directory to the Default Storage Group
* Move video files from the old directory to the new
* Start mythbackend to test recordings
* Stop mythbackend
* Remove old directory from the Default Storage Group
* Start mythbackend

Worked without so much as a hiccup.

edit: Added test steps I forgot about. I don't know if they were significant.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Back from vacation...

This reflects ignorance on my part. I guess I can go thrashing around through mythtv-setup, but I'll start by asking. How/where do you add a new directory to the Default Storage Group? (or remove the old one, for that matter) I presume the answer is in mythtv-setup, where I don't go very often.
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