Mum was away over Christmas, so I recorded a couple of programs for her.

This then provided the next challenge with Mythtv, how to get a recording onto a DVD in a playable format. Mythtv has an archive utility, so here’s what I did.

On the main menu, select Optical Discs, Archive files. The first time I selected Create Archive – this isn’t the option I wanted, what this does is copy the recording to DVD, rather than create a playable DVD. Anyway, select Create DVD and then choose the type of media, I used DVD+/-RW and selected to burn to DVD and force overwrite DVD-RW.

Next you select the theme for the DVD menus, I used the first one, G.A.N.T. Animated.

Then you select the recording, file or videos that you want to burn to DVD. Select Add Rec and then when the list appears, go up to change from All Recordings to the individual groups, it makes it much easier to find the one you want. Highlight the one you want and press enter (space), then select OK, this takes you back to the screen showing the recording that you want to burn and how much space they will take. Press Next and the system will start to check the recording for any errors. This is where my first problem came:

Failed to run mythtranscode to fix any errors
ERROR: Failed while running mytharchivehelper to get stream information from “/mnt/usb1/mythtv/2001_20101229195800.mpg”

After searching , I found the answer (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=610856) was to delete the .ICEauthority file in the user home directory. This allowed the software to progress past this stage. I need to find a better solution for this as the file is recreated every time you log on.

The next error I got was ‘IOError: Cannot open resource‘. Searching (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/463495) found that this was related to to location of a font file. I could have linked the file, but just copied it to the expected location.

I thought I’d got there, as it proceeded for a long time, before giving me the next error, ‘OSError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted‘. This turned out to be case of removing the tick from the FIFO setting (http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17169&sid=0dbdb1f878b278a481a2998c613cf107)

It did fail to actually burn the DVD, ERROR: Failed while running growisofs, but it had created all the files, so I burnt them myself. The burning problem was either due to permissions or the disc not being blank ( I know, I selected to force overwrite), we’ll see what happens the next time.

Edit: OK, with a blank disc it was able to write the DVD, but then I got 🙁 unable to reload tray: No such file or directory. The DVD did burn and is playable. The error seems to be a bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dvd+rw-tools/+bug/615382), but as it isn’t causing me a problem, I won’t worry about it for the moment.