I'm running KnoppMyth R5D1 controlling a Dish Network receiver via an IRBlaster.

After much work, I can sometimes get it the blaster to start working correctly. I can switch to LiveTV and accurately switch channels. However, upon reboot, all the settings went away, and I have been unsuccessful in tracking down the problem.

Upon (re)boot, MythTV only displays snow. I close out of MythFrontEnd, ps -A | grep mythbackend, kill 123pid, which shutsdown mythbackend. (Is there a better way to close out of mythbackend, btw?)

I run a test '/etc/irblaster/channel_change.sh 107' and it errors out with:



I run irblaster.sh, answer it yes I have an irblaster, its on COM1, and I'm using a Dish receiver.

Now, when I run '/etc/irblaster/channel_change.sh 107' it correctly changes the channel without any errors.

So I boot mythbackend (no errors there on the irsend test), boot mythfrontend, get static, close mythfrontend, and see that irsend was erroring in the shell that mythbackend was running in. WTF!?

I kill mythbackend, try to run a test channel_change.sh, and it errors with the irblaster: connection refused item. If I rerun the irblaster.sh setup script, irblaster and irsend start working again. (Successful channel_change.sh)

All of this tells me that it appears to be working until the frontend starts, and then it gets hosed. I'm stuck now, however, and don't know what to check.

Any advice on configuration settings I can check?

FYI, under mythtv-setup, my video source is set to:

Video source: DishTV
External Channel Change Command: /etc/irblaster/channel_change.sh
Preset tuner to channel: 3 (* the channel my dish receiver is outputting to)
Starting channel: 4 (* the first channel I have in DishTV)

OBTW, if I obliterate the External Channel Change Command and Preset Tuner to Channel fields, I can boot it up and it gives me a screen.

If I shut it all down, put the fields back in, boot it all back up, it will start correctly, but I can't change channels. When I close it out, I can see the irsend errors from up above.

I actually did have the whole thing working last night, but now I can't seem to figure out how I got it working. In any event, it gets whiped at reboot.

Perhaps I should off cliffnotes for brevity:

Whenever I run mythfrontend it seems to break the irblaster.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?

So I did a complete format and reinstall to make sure there wasn't anything really strange going on, and think I've somewhat isolated the problem.

Randomly something is killing irblasterd. The way I'm getting around it right now is to check ps -A | grep irblasterd whenever I boot or shut down the mythfrontend. I have no idea what's causing it, or why it sometimes kills and sometimes runs for several hours.

Something interesting I've also noted is that the Preset Tuner to Channel isn't working. It tries to tune it to some crazy number, regardless of what I have in the channel editor table. (It defaults to a freq in the 63k's or so, which doesn't work, and if I change it to '3', it doesn't work.)

I've gotten around this by manually changing the tuner's channel via the command line and leaving the Preset Tuner to Channel field blank.