User:Nmcclana/Upgrading from 0.20.2 to 0.21 on Ubuntu gutsy from gutsy backport

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Yearning for the improvements to mythweb, I added the gutsy backports to my sources (howto: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports ) and upgraded to .21.

Backend upgrade was very smooth - all data and settings were kept. I had to open Mythtvsetup to get everything working. I just opened it and closed it, and ran mythfilldatabase. You'll need to add gutsy backports to your sources in synaptic. Click on the refresh button, find the mythtv-backend meta package and upgrade. Once the upgrade is complete open up mythtvsetup and close it (that's all I had to do).

The new mythweb is very nice. I enabled the flash streaming player. If you want flash streaming, you'll have to manually compile ffmpeg. The version of ffmpeg in the ubuntu repo doesn't have mp3 support compiled in. Doing this is very easy, however http://po-ru.com/diary/fixing-ffmpeg-on-ubuntu/. You'll also need to enable it in the config menus (which have improved, too).

One glitch of mythweb is if you login with a wap / wml device and then go back to mythweb on your computer, mythtv associates that login with the handheld.css, so you won't get the full interface. I had to remove a setting in sql to get it to work again.

I also can't get the music player in mythweb to play music. Trying to play the stream with totem will crash it. Playing the stream with winamp gives me an error (error syncing stream). Update - I did figure this out. seems like winamp won't sync to the stream, but vlc worked nicely. I also added a few lines to mp3act to handle the wma extension (not sure it was necessary, though). in /var/www/mythweb/modules/music/stream.php around line 64, you'll see some mimetype switches. I added a switch for wma;

// Mime type
    switch (substr($fname, -3)) {
        case 'wma':
            $mime = 'audio/x-ms-wma';
            break;
        case 'jpg':
            $mime = 'image/jpeg';
            break;
        case 'gif':
            $mime = 'image/gif';
            break;
        case 'png':
            $mime = 'image/png';
            break;
        case 'mp3':
            $mime = 'audio/mpeg';
            break;

UPnP support is improved, although still not perfect. UPnP streaming of music to my xbox media center is just fine. Streaming videos works, too. But if I try to stream a recorded show, I get about 30 seconds of video and the stream stops. UPnP to my xbox 360 works, but only for mythvideo (it also drops out sometimes after 10-20 minutes of viewing). I was hoping on music support to my 360. Your xbox360 will find the mythtv media server, but will show recordings when you look at the music menu. It will show mythvideo videos when you look thru videos.

Upgrading my frontends was a pain. Everything worked fine until I went from 'recently recorded' to the main menu - I'd get a segfault and X would crash. I chalked this up to my via chipset. But on my other laptop (intel 9xx video), mythfrontend would also crash. Switching the interface to QT was the solution.

Also on the frontend side, things are pretty much the same. No big changes to the major plugins. The new video rendering setup is quite a bit more complex than before. There are a lot of things to experiment with. A big help to users with HD systems

I was cautious and considered waiting until Hardy, when .21 will enter the main repo, but there's really no benefit to waiting. Everything went very smoothly, mythweb contains some significant improvements, HD is easier than before, and everything continues to 'just work'.