I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

At some point in the past, cable boxes were simple things that just changed channel, now they have a whole host of different states like on demand that can really confuse mythtv.

I've set up channel 109 (which is On Demand Preview on the Virgin box) to put the box into on-demand mode, giving mythtv a way of knowing the cable box is doing something other than displaying one of the conventional channels. It relies on users using channel 109 to switch to On-Demand mode, so isn't perfect, but it seems to work.

Changing the hostname of anything that's been near mythtv is a pain in the ass. There's a howto using an offline copy of the data that I probably should have followed, but I didn't so after giving myself a world of problems, I'm going to try and work with the data online with phpMyAdmin. Seriously hardcore users could go with an interactive mysql session, but it's not amazing for browsing data quickly.

To set your video timer first you need a reliable clock. Done that. The Debian PIII of usefulness syncs it's clock off of pool.ntp.org. The Ubuntu box does the same, falling back on the Debian box if we lose the Virgin* connection.