Just before the Christmas holiday I decided that I’d update MythTV to the then recently released 0.22. Since the latest Freeview retune lots of channels had been broken, and MythTV backend setup was unable to find most of the channels, and the ones that it did would only get a lock intermittently.

Anyway, upgrading Myth broke lots of things under Ubuntu 8.04, so I finally bit the bullet and upgraded Ubuntu to 9.04, something I had been putting off for a long time. This part of the upgrade was easy enough. I still find that the upgrade process is clunky in the way it pauses every now and again to ask you if you want to keep several configuration files, which means that it’s impossible to leave it unattended during the upgrade.

Karmic is nice enough, I like that the Nvidia drivers work automatically (finally), but I was just glad that it didn’t break too many things.

Myth 0.22 worked, I’m not too fond of the new interface (yes, I’m aware that there are other ones), but the main problem was that the channel tuning situation actually became worse!

After lots of messing around I (re)stumbled across the fact that the Hauppauge Nova 500T tuner needs to have a line added into the modprobe configuration in order to activate the low noise amplification. I had done this under 8.04, but the 9.04 installation renames the old options file and creates a new one that is missing the line. After adding this back in, powering off and then on again, followed by a MythTV retune, I now have a few more channels. I get Virgin1 again, but am still missing one of the Freeview muxes, although it is the lowest powered one from the transmitter , so maybe it’s just a reception problem. So no ITV1, ITV2, or Channel 4 for now! Maybe in April following the analogue switch off, as the power should be increased then…

In addition, I’ve been testing XBMC, which I haven’t used since the original Xbox version. The interface is nice, I just wish that the TV interface was better, as it simply presents plain lists of everything (channels, programs, recordings). It works well, but is slightly slower in changing channels. Actually I take that back: it fails to change channels and appears to have frozen now. So, I think I’ll still be using Myth for viewing TV for the time being.