Release Notes - 0.21

This is an unreleased development version

These are the changes in the current development version of MythTV from the 0.20 release. Currently these features are slated for the 0.21 release. Some of these changes, most notably the fixes, will likely appear in a 0.20.1 release.

As always, these features are available in the Subversion system but be prepared if you plan to run this version and subscribe to the -dev and -commit mailing lists to keep up to date on development.

Updated through revision 13110 (Note: Current revision is 14191, this page needs updating)

Major changes

Added Watch List feature to Watch Recordings listing programs most useful to watch in order to catch up on series and shows you have fallen behind in watching.
Added support for QAM recording using HDHomeRun device. Requires firmware 21-09-2006 or newer.
New official plugins:
- MythMovies: provides show times and cinema listings based on Zip/Post code and a given radius.
- MythZoneMinder: ZoneMinder is a system for monitoring cctv cameras. It uses a web interface which doesn't work very well on a MythTV only system so the plugin provides a remote friendly interface to some of the functions provided by ZM.
Added storage groups. This allows multiple recording directories, where each storage group is a list of directories.
Added auto discovery of MythTV servers/frontends
Added FLV playback support for MythWeb

MythTV

New Features

Added Watch List feature to Watch Recordings listing programs most useful to watch in order to catch up on series and shows you have fallen behind in watching.
Added support for QAM recording using HDHomeRun device. Requires firmware 21-09-2006 or newer.
Added storage groups. This allows multiple recording directories, where each storage group is a list of directories.
Added auto discovery of MythTV servers/frontends
Added new 'watched' flag for recordings which can be set manually or automatically and optinally increase auto expiration priority for watched shows. Includes a new 'watched' icon in the frontend and in MythWeb.
Improved Jump to Program feature while watching a recording. This action will now bring up the Watch Recordings screen for selection of the program.
Attempt to re-record programs that are not recorded because of a channel change failure
Added support for AC3 passthrough audio with OSS drivers
Added Schedule Status to the System Status screen
Added BBC Series link functionality
Added the ability to set the Commercial Detection method on a per-channel basis
Better caching of recording data on frontend for faster performance
Added short commands for telnet control of the frontend
Added option for non-default MySQL port configuration using the DBPort option in the mysql.txt
Use tv_find_grabbers to find XMLTV grabbers to use. Requires XMLTV version 0.5.43 or higher.
Updated --nosched command-line option to the backend to prevent only new recordings from firing off. It does not prevent the scheduler from running which allows for better debugging. Recordings not recorded during this time are marked as rsOffLine.
Added Last Recorded and Next Recording to Program Details screen
Pressing '7' on the Recording Priorities screen allows sorting by last_record field
Power on a firewire connected recorder if it is off when interacting with it
Added '-v most' verbose option to show most debugging messages without showing excesssively verbose options like database
Added options for debugging events on the master backend
Added CHANGERECGROUP keyboard binding in Watch Recordings to bring up the Select Group Filter box. No key is bound by default.
The 'Delete Follows Symlinks' feature now follows relative symlinks
Added EchoStar and Nimiq tv service type descriptors for digital recordings
Program Finder entries are now highlighted like the Watch Recordings screen
Added support for US style EIA-608 captions
Allow European non-numeric freqid's to be added by mythfilldatabase
Added support for polarity inversion in DiSEqC setups
Allow control of the number of pre-cached theme resolutions
Added ability to record either the main audio, SAP audio, or both (with recent ivtv drivers)
Disabled convert filter
Extended support for recovery from a EINVAL or EIO to v4l2 drivers
Improved INFO menu with toggle buttons for AutoExpire and Episode Preservation
Added option to sort the "All Programs" list differently from other program lists
Added multi-select option for selecting default view of Watch Recordings
Add a CHANGEGROUPVIEW keybinding on the Watch Recordings screen to allow directly popping up the Group View changer
Add the ability to have a 'Preserved' flag icon on the Watch Recordings screen. No themes were modified to support this as it is up to theme designers to implement if desired due to the already large number of possible icon flags.
Allow turning off of UPnP support with --noupnp option on the backend.
Allow selection of dual audio track from the OSD menu instead of mute hack
Improved performance of scheduler which should improve performance of Watch Recordings when recordings are deleted, stopped or started
Added tuning of raw MPEG channels in HDHRRecorder
End of recording prompts changed to OSD prompts
Added Malasyian analog TV frequency table
Added outline to EIA-608 captions when they are not on a black background and adds a bold font option for better visibility with low resolution streams.
Added support for restarting the MHEG engine when requested by the broadcaster
Added a --clearcache command line argument to mythbackend that will trigger a CLEAR_SETTINGS_CACHE event to be sent out to all connected programs
Remove HTML code from text file based captions
Improved FreeboxRecorder's RTSP support so that other transport methods can be used and fixes some bugs in the M3U channel parser
Allow an IP address to be used to reference an HDHomeRun device directly
Added HDHomeRun channel scanning, cygwin compilation and broadcast on all routes (for finding device on network when multiple routes exist.)
Added checks of dvb-utils imported channels before adding them to the DB
Added support for virtual keyboards in comboboxes
Added a clock in the main menu screens - requires support in a theme's base.xml file - see [1]
Added support for UDP, RTP and file stream handlers to IPTV recorder (formerly Freebox recorder)
Added a new setting under Setup -> TV Settings -> Playback to allow the user to force Myth to prefer to stream files from a remote backend
Added a setting to use the Watch List as the initial view on the Watch Recordings screen
Enabled the popup keyboard to work with editable comboboxes
Added ability to request a Preview Image of any size and time within the file using the XML method getPreviewImage
Added support for the xmltv --capabilities and --preferredmethod arguments to mythfilldatabase.
Various updates to ivtv recorder
Added randomization of the mythfilldatabase runtimes within the desired start/end run window
Added the ability to save a PNG file of the currently displayed video frame by using the SCREENSHOT keybinding or the "play save screenshot FILENAME WxH" command in the Network Control socket interface.
Expand "action on playback exit" option to include Live TV
Added a dupin option for "Record new episode first showings"
Added an option in Set Recording Priorities to avoid back to back recordings from different channels

Fixes

Fixed programinfo passing between master and slave backend. This required a protocol change to version 31.
Fixed prebuffer pauses on LiveTV transitions by setting the proper bitrate in the RingBuffer after it is reset by an OpenFile
Prevent the OSD from always being drawn, even when not in use
Fixed V4L2 API compatibility with IVTV 0.8
Separated font sizing from display DPI
Fixed updating of the last_record field
Fixed bug in cutlist conversion
Fixed bug where Playback screen would be missing the recorded ID for a show
Reduced firewire packet buffer from 8000 to 2000
Verify that a firewire node is a STB
Fixed 8PSK modulation tuning
Added EIT fixup for MultiChoice Africa
Fixed problem causing duplicate rows for manually scheduled programs to appear in Watch Recording list
Fixed problem where backend might fail deleting a file due to filename being changed by transcoding
Fixed problem with non-GUI programs initalizing OSD
Added date to UPnP resonse header
Fixed issue with aborted data over UPnP
Fixed truncating delete code by grabbing filesize prior to unlinking
Improved sending of committed DiSEqC messages
Disabled automatic portion of WrapTimecode which was causing problems
Fixed TS packet handling when discontinuity detected
Fixed South African VHF frequencies
Fixed SW42 and SW64 support for pre-DiSEqC
Fixed defaulting of channel source when adding a new channel in the channel editor
Fixed favorite channel and direct channel entering in browse mode
Added Intel IEGD driver to fix for broken I420 support
Fixed deleting a video source which did not delete its associated channels
Fixed audio muting issue with v4l-compat support
Fixed quickdnr, denoise3d, and crop filters to work with padded YUV strides
Fixed scanning of DVB-C muxes
Fixed deletion of orphaned channels
Fixed the transport editor which was only showing data if a DVB device was connected.
Fixed the transport editor presenting HDHomeRun and HDTV transports as analog transports not as ATSC transports.
Fixed the transport editor showing DVB-S frequencies as being in Hz, when they are actually in kHz.
Fixed ATSC EIT time offset
Fixed the recordedprogram, recordedrating, and recordedcredits tables cleanup and move the cleanup into the housekeeper instead of mythfilldatabase
Allow renumbered ATSC channels to be sorted properly
Tightens the criteria for a private stream to be declared as a video stream which should fix recordings of some channels where this was a problem
Fixed a segfault when we fail to set up a signal monitor for a digital channel
Fixed playback by selecting the first video stream found in the PMT. This allows the people with weird broadcasts to function, without inhibiting the functionality of Interactve TV (MHEG)
Fixed the ProgramInfo::showDetails() ratings string
Fixed interpretation of hide_guide property in ATSC PSIP
Fixed a couple bugs enabling/disabling the xmltv and onairguide configs for a channel
Added two new system information table types for MPEG streams, "mpeg" and "opencable".
Changed Digital TV tuning to use the System Information Standard to determine what to use to tune ATSC and DVB and by extension MPEG and OpenCable? streams
Various commercial detection improvements
Fixed frontend SEGV when editing a custom recording rule via the watch recordings screen
Fixed EPG issues and not exiting correctly from live tv
Fixed MythTV compilation when the DVB-S2 patches are applied to the DVB drivers.
Fixed the scanner not working properly when DiSEqC input is connected to a source which is also connected to another DiSEqC input
Fixed space calculations in util.cpp's getDiskSpace() function
Added two missing Aspect override options to the Aspect override menu.
Default recording profiles for Firewire and DBox2 recorders are now created
Fixed a problem where exiting the Appearance settings sometimes causes a segfault
Fixed 100% cpu usage when xbox 360 is on the network & adds missing return in function (uPnP)
Fixed various firewire problems
Fixed race with "Watch as it records"
Fixed the picture adjustment for V4L2 attributes with negative values.
Added channel looking to eit cache, should prevent duplicate eit insertions
Fixed the "current_picture uninitialized" and "first frame is no key frame" libavcodec seeking errors for new recordings
Fixed a bug causing original airdates prior to 1970 to be erroneously set to Dec 31 1969 by passing the original air date around in Qt::ISODate (YYYY-MM-DD) format instead of converting to unixtime
Fixed bogus original air dates stuffed into the recorded table.
Fixed bug in DataDirect setup of ATSC channels.
Fixed position maps for recorders with signalmonitor support after a LiveTV switch
Fixed seeking after swapping PiP
Fixed problem where 'delete' option shows up in the exit prompt when exiting a video(non-dvd) played by the internal player
A scheduled program is now rescheduled when the user cancels it to watch live TV instead
Fixes for opening CDROM tray when there is no disk in it
Recordings with a blank category field now show up as "Unknown" in the Recording Group/Category chooser popup
Fixed an unitialized variable that could lead to a segfault under certain circumstances

Mac OS X

New directory of OS X bundling tools
Added MediaMonitor support
Added digital audio support
Improved audio timestamp calculations

Plugins

MythArchive

Added a thumbnail image finder
Added support for threading processes if system reports more than one processor available
Added options for setting DVD date and time formats
Added a thumbnail offset and bookmark image option to MythArchive
Added ability to change the final order that files will be shown on the DVD title menus
Added a button on the chapter menu to take you back to the title menu
Added the possibility to add animated thumbnail images to the DVD themes. Also added a couple of themes that use the new feature
Added menu option to test play a created DVD
Added an option to apply a sync offset when remuxing the video and audio streams together using mplex.
Various improvements to the log viewer
Changed the way items are selected for archive
Change how the lock file works to prevent the situation where a stale lock file is left behind after a system crash
Fixed problem where mytharchivehelper was returning the wrong aspect ratio for .nuv files
Fixed bug where save directory was not being passed properly
Fixed bug where all recording fields were not requested from the database
Prevent installation of plugin if all archiving options are disabled
Fixed problems with filenames containing apostrophes
Look for music and images in shared folders after default locations
Fixed wrong aspect ratio when using Autoplay themes
Fixed a mixup when retrieving the chanid and starttime from the DB
Fixed problem with No Menu theme when trying to add movies
Fixed handling of the temp work directory setting to prevent double '/'s from being added to paths.
Fixed a segfault in the 'Select Recordings' screen if no suitable recordings can be found

MythBrowser

MythControls

MythDVD

Plugin removed. Merged with MythVideo

MythFlix

MythGallery

Prevents unbound keys from stopping a slideshow
Info key tells you what kind of slideshow you are in

MythGame

Added a new option to hash the "All Games" gametree game listings. This can make navigating long lists a little simpler
Added the ability to chain commands seperated by ';' when launching an emulator or game
Ensure any screenshot is cleared when navigating the tree after you pass a game with a screenshot

MythMovies

Provides show times and cinema listings based on Zip/Post code and a given radius. It uses external scripts to grab times and so can be used in any country so long as a script is written for a local data source. Ships with a grabber for the USA which uses the ignyte website.

MythMusic

Rip screen is more remote friendly and allows you to rip several CDs without having to do a full rescan after each one
Added a new "Import Files" menu option to MythMusic. This allows you to import files that have already been ripped elsewhere and insert them into the MythMusic storage directory.
Added support for libvisual to allow visualisations from the likes of ProjectM
Added caching of artist, album, genre and directory ids to mythmusic scanning to reduce the number of database queries.
Added the option to choose the preferred encoding for ID3 tags
Information on Album Artwork is now stored in the database
Fixed SQL error when adding by genre to playlist
Fixed failure to write out the proper VBR header causing most players to report incorrect play lengths for all files ripped by MythMusic to VBR mp3 format
Fixed segfault when activating the 'Select Music Playlists' jumppoint twice in quick succession.
Fixed the volume display only showing on the LCD the first time it is used.
Fixed search to be able to find ' characters
Added support for new flac API introduced in 1.1.3
Fixed reading filenames containing non-ascii characters.
Cleaned up console output

MythNews

Extended httpcomms to report status of progress
Added various RSS feeds to feed list
Improved handling of HTML and CDATA content in RSS descriptions
Display site images
Display article images/thumbnails
Visual icon indicating RSS attachment
Visual icon indicating RSS attachment needs downloading
Playback of attachments using internal player (video only)
Progress indicator during download including byte count

MythPhone

Fix two translation issues with the call popup dial or answer dialog

MythVideo

Added UPnP support on the backend for streaming videos
Added imdbpy.py which uses the IMDbPY to fetch the metadata.
Added find_meta.py for intelligent recursive metadata fetching from command line.
Improved XvMC internal dvd player support. Uses XV when in DVD menu and XvMC when in the main title
Added DVD bookmark support.
Added chapter menu to osd menu when watching dvd
Added a new poster grabber script (fetch_poster.py) which grabs posters from movieposter.com
Added ability for user to set the DVD drive speed when using the internal dvd player. default is 2x.
Added scripts from Pekka Jaaskelainen
Improved imdb.pl handling of no year titles
Fixed segfault when external player exits
Fixed MySQL 3.x compatibility
Fixed choppy playback on some DVD main titles
Fixed segfault when external player exits
Fixed problem with missing menu buttons on some DVD titles
Fixed enabling of subtitles from main DVD menu
Fixed title menu selection
Made jumps using seekrwnd, and seekfwd a little more predictable
Handle transition from main title to still frame and a resolution change when using the standard decoder
Fixed problem where audio stutters during chapter jumps
Disabled frame-by-frame jump when watching a dvd
Fixed jumping from a main feature to a dvd menu causing the dvd menu button to possibly not to show up
Fixed dvd menu selecting the wrong subtitle stream
Various DVD seeking fixes/improvements
Fixed hitting chapter menu takes you back to the main menu in DVD playback

MythWeather

Fixed some thundershowers types that were pointing to the wrong icon

MythWeb

Added FLV playback support
Completed mp3act integration with music module
Added support to MythWeb for utilizing Storage Groups
.htaccess file replaced by an apache.conf file
Added recording details page
The mythvideo, settings, weather and recording list pages has been rewritten/cleaned up
Added basic playback group editing
Added a little green counter in the bottom left of the browser window showing how many pending ajax requests there are
Added jobqueue status and queueing to the recording details page
Fixed passing null values when scheduling recordings
Fixed myth:// URLs
Improved file streaming using sys calls
Fixed links for manually overridden video URLs
Fixed music module detection
Allow negative recording priorities to be set
Fixed login for users who use both mobile and PC logins
Fixed category display
Fixed HTTPS streaming and broken images
Added mobile support for HTC Tornado
Fixed the airdate display issues for pending movie recordings
Replaced onchange with onclick, to fix the konqueror bug
Apply sanity check for the date range popup menu, for those people who occasionally get wacky data from DVB EIT data
Default values for start/end offset for new schedules are now used

MythZoneMinder

New plugin: ZoneMinder is a system for monitoring cctv cameras. It uses a web interface which doesn't work very well on a MythTV only system so the plugin provides a remote friendly interface to some of the functions provided by ZM.

Support libraries

Utility Applications

myth_archive_job.pl

Don't divide the file size by 1 megabyte twice

mythrename.pl

Modified to use new Perl bindings

myth.rebuilddatabase.pl

Fixed --quick-run

mythtranscode

Added support for updating JobQueue progress and allowing Stop commands
Added support for writing TS streams
Added support for saving the language ID for TS streams
Added PAT/PMT support to TS streams in transcoder
Added the ability for the lossy transcoder's profile autodetection code to use autodetect profiles based on the height and fps of the input video
Stop transcoding when total frames is reached to prevent stray frames
Fixed some audio sync issues
Fixed not reinitializing stream properties when changing streams
Fixed segfault by taking the 1st video stream (rather than the last) when multiple video streams are present
Fixed segfault with non-empty buffer
Fixed padding packets from being written to stream
When resizing video in the lossy side of mythtranscode, trim off the bottom 8 pixels when we encounter a video file that is 1088 pixels high
Fixed issue when the cut-point was at a corrupted section of the stream

mythfilldatabase

Add another check criteria that will force mythfilldatabase to download data for a particular day. If the number of channels with at least one program between 6pm and midnight is less than 90% of the count for the previous day, a data refresh will be initiated.
Parse more information from the xmltv data, including HDTV, subtitle and audio details
Fixed category_type for grabbers that use [Ff]ilm in the category field to indicate theatrical motion pictures.

mythwelcome

Fixed crashes with hybrid tuner cards
Allow daily wakeup periods to cross midnight
Make wakeup command fully configurable

mythshutdown

Add option to query whether backend is currently recording (-s returns 8)
Add option to set wakeup time based on next scheduled recording (-t)
Add option to check backend status, set wakeup time and shutdown if successful - useful for "immediate" shutdown scripts and shutdown from remote control (-x)

firewire_tester

Added -R option to reset firewire bus

Mythextras

nuvexport

Imported into mythtv svn