User:Danc/Upgrading from 0.20.2 to 0.21 on Fedora 8 from rpms

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I upgraded from 0.20.2 to 0.21 the other day, and the install, for the most part, went very smoothly (about as smoothly as they could have).

This is a quick list of the steps I took, and how things went. It's not supposed to be a walkthrough, but rather a example of an upgrade that was successful.

Salute

Before I begin, I must take my hat off to the developers of this software- it truly is top notch, and is light years ahead of any MS based solution out there. (I just have to chuckle when I see people showing off their MCE machines). So THANK YOU!! (I am a software developer, and I wish I could help, but I have a baby girl at home that comes first).

Intro

I just thought I'd write a quick summary of the steps I took (I don't mean for this to be a complete walkthrough), and report any problems I did face (they were tiny). I'm not claiming to be an expert, but I've been using mythtv for a little over a year now, and I've done a couple of these upgrades now.

I'm running an AMD 64-bit machine, using an nvidia geforce 7xxx series video card. I just freshly installed Fedora 8 x64 about a month ago, after learning that FC6 was twilighted.

I took this opportunity to upgrade all the software on my system, not just mythtv. So it might not be necessary to do everything on here.

Backup the database

Since everyone who's anyone recommends this before doing any upgrade, this was an obvious first step. I stopped mythbackend and backed up the database. Personally, I have mysql administrator gui on another machine, and initiate the backup from there.

Make sure yum-plugin-kmdl is installed

Since I'm going to be upgrading everything on my system, including the kernel- this package is great to have. It upgrades all the fancy drivers that are installed as kernel modules (rather than built into the kernel) that are compiled against a particular kernel version.

I ran yum install yum-plugin-kmdl to install the plugin.

For me, the only driver that needs upgrading is my nvidia driver. If I didn't have this plugin, my X server wouldn't work when I boot into the new kernel until I upgrade the nvidia kernel module.

I've heard other people need to upgrade other kernel modules, such as sound card modules, or modules for lirc- but I don't use any of those.

Run yum upgrade

I upgraded all my software (including mythtv)using this command. I didn't include the -y because I wanted to verify that my kernel modules would be upgraded.

After that was done, I rebooted to start up the new kernel.

As I write this, I realize that I forgot to stop mythbackend from running at boot time. This should be done. As root, run /sbin/chkconfig mythbackend off before rebooting.

Run mythtvsetup

As soon as all the upgrades were complete, I ran mythtvsetup. This was a little scary at first, because I got a bunch of database errors. This was quickly resolved when mythtvsetup asked me to upgrade the database schema. I answered yes, and everything worked great from then on.

I didn't need to change anything in mythtvsetup- all my settings were migrated automatically.

Start mythbackend, and run mythfrontend

As root, I ran /sbin/service mythbackend start to start up the backend. Also, run /sbin/chkconfig mythbackend on to reenable mythbackend to start on boot.

As mythtv user, I ran mythfrontend to start up the frontend. Everything startup up OK, and I was able to use mythtv as before (for the most part).

Adjust playback settings

The only thing that didn't work as expected was my playback. It was choppy. I took a look at my playback settings, and realized that there are now far more playback options then before, and because of that, my previous settings couldn't be migrated. It was trying to use xvmc, which I don't use (I don't want a grayscale OSD). I quickly reconfigured mythtv to use ffmpeg, and everything ran smoothly after that.

Unresolved Issues

After doing the previous 6 steps, my mythtv box effectively ran as a DVR again- I could record shows, and view them later, and they play smooth. There are a few minor issues I still have though:

 1) My fonts look a little too big now, and sometimes things get a little chopped off (in my "watch recordings" screen).
    I could probably fix this with some tweaking, but I haven't had time yet.

 2) I have issues with the "news feeds" feature- when I try to view anything that isn't text.  For example,
a dilbert cartoon or a google video feed, it says that it's downloading the media, and when it's done, nothing happens.  

In the release notes, they mention something about being able to view pictures and whatnot in the news feeds viewer, but that doesn't seem to be working for me. It's probably something I still need to tweak.

Good Luck Everyone!

-Dan