Mythtv & user jobs

I have a running installation of Mythbuntu 8.04 with a DVB-T card installed, and it’s working pretty good. Recently I wanted to get a user-job running which could transcode selected tv recordings to XVID and move them into the Video folders. Setting up the job was not that difficult but running the job did not produce any output. A view in the /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log showed a listing with an error in the nuvexport-xvid script at line 36. But that was not interessting. Furthermore the output in the error log showed

No backends found. Please copy /home/myththtv/.mythtv/config.xml from a working Mythtv installation instead

A quick google gave the result. Normal the mythtv-frontend is running under the logged in user, which in my case was me, but the nuvexport-xvid actually did run under the mythtv user, and therefore not config.xml file was found. A copy of the config.xml from my user directory to the mythtv folder solved the issue.

Windows 7 stuff

I have been running Windows 7 RC for a couple of months, before the official release of the product. So far I have been very pleased, except for one thing, but that’s a different story. But just tripped over this page with 77 interesting things you can do with Windows 7. For supporters a new tool “Problems Step Recorder” lets the user run through a trouble’ish flow and screen-dumps with information are recorded and saved. The supporter have then possibility to see what actual happens. Nice. But check out all the nice stuff here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.10.77windows.aspx

Technorati Tags: Windows 7

Powershell Batch Files Rename

I needed to rename a bunch of files, all starting with “POD_”. I wanted to remove the “POD_” from every file. In my eager to learn Powershell this was a good opportunity to launch the Powershell ISE. After a short Google Search this made my life more Powershellish:

dir -filter "POD_*" |
rename-item -newname { $_.name -replace "POD_*", ""}

The “dir –filter “POD_*” command locates all files. These are piped to the rename-item cmdlet. Using the “-newname” param and some regular-expression, the files are renamed as wanted

Running 32-bit VBScript on a 64-bit server

Had a issue with running a Vbscript which made calls to 32-bit COM objects. First view assumed that the COM objects were not registered correctly. But on a 64-bit platform (windows that is), 32-bit and 64-bit COM objects are registered in the reg-database in 2 seperate nodes. So running regdllview-64 bit did not show the needed com-objects, leading to suspicion that the files was not correctly installed. But running the 32-bit version of regdllview showed the files, so everything should be ok. This lead to the assumption that when triggering the vbscript, the 64-bit Windows Script Host Engine was triggered instead of the 32-bit version. On 64-bit Windows the folder [\<windowsdir>\sysWoW64] contains 32-bit versions of equivalent 64-bit files found in [\<windowsdir>\system32].

Using Live Writer with Windows 7

It’s pretty slick using Live Writer to apply new entries on the Blog. I don’t know weather it’s more fancy to use Live Writer on Win7 than on other platforms?