Mythbuntu 8.04 ‘Watch TV’ fails

In our living room we have an older Dell Desktop using it with MythTV as Multimedia and TV Center outputting to a Dell 24 ” Screen (awesome quality that thing is!). Anyway, I started with 7.10 and after a little while got everything working. Not without headaches though, especially for the lirc configuration (Basically, the default lirc does not work and in my custom made configuration files I used different names for it).

Anyway, the update to 8.04 did not go down as easy as on my Laptop, the whole thing did work really slow and it was impossible to watch TV properly. And actually, I am not a hundred percent sure what made it work again, but I believe it has been a combination of disabling Desktop effects (System->Appearance->Visual Effects: set to None) and some sort of settings in MythTV configuration for slower machines. I also experienced differences when using OpenGL and Qt. Qt definetely works better for me (in MythTV frontend->Utilities/Setup->Setup->Appearance). Another little annoying thing is that the update did overwrite my custom build lirc configuration, that is probably an issue with the Mythbuntu Control Center. Anyway, I should be able to reproduce the steps for my DVICO Dual capture cards and Remote (the ones out of the box do not work fully, only volume and the circle).

But two days ago it went pairshaped, I believe I did a hard shutdown (pressing power button for a couple of seconds) while the box was still running. The next day I could not watch TV anymore. I tried I do it the easy way and first reinstalled, than deinstalled and installed again the mythTV Front and Backend. Nope, still the same results. I could though scan for channels and start the Frontend, just when I clicked the “Watch TV” option, it came back to the menu after two or three seconds without showing any error. I did not really have nerves for checking error logs as I just wanted to watch some TV last night, so ended up watching a DVD. And my rest must have helped. This morning I checked the DB settings with MySQL Administrator and found that one table (‘mythconverg.recordings’) was marked as corrupted. Running the repair tool on it and voila! everything works like a charme again.