Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/03/13/mythweb-database.html

I’m finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using
this this
USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time
away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I’ve
been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she’s at work,
and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software
freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did
discover this
bug after it had already been closed but had to
pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn’t
moved to testing.

Kodi works fine after installing it via apt, and since VDR is packaged for
Debian, I tried getting VDR working instead of MythTV at first. I almost
had it working but then I got this error:

VNSI-Error: cxSocket::read: read() error at 0/4

when trying to use kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi (1.11.15-1) with vdr-plugin-vnsiserver
(1:1.3.1) combined with vdr (2.2.0-5) and kodi (16.0+dfsg1-1). I tried
briefly using the upstream plugins for both VDR and Kodi just to be sure
I’d produce the same error, and got the same so I started by reporting this
on the Kodi
VDR backend forum. If I don’t get a response there in a few weeks,
I’ll file it as a bug against kodi-pvr-vdr-vnsi instead.

For now, I gave up on VDR (which I rather liked, very old-school
Unix-server module was to build a PVR), and tried MythTV instead since it’s
also GPL’d. Since there weren’t Debian packages,
I followed
this building from source tutorial on MythTV’s website.

I didn’t think I’d actually
need to
install MythWeb at first, because I am using Kodi primarily and am only
using MythTV backend to handle the tuner card. It was pretty odd that you
can only configure MythTV via a QT program
called mythtv-setup, but ok, I did that, and it was
relatiavely straight forward. Once I did, playback was working reasonable
using Kodi’s MythTV plugin. (BTW, if you end up doing this, it’s fine to
test Kodi as its own in a window with a desktop environment running, but I
had playback speed issues in that usage, but they went away fully when I
switched to a simple .xinitrc that just
called kodi-standalone.

The only problem left was that I noticed that I was not
getting Event Information Table
(EIT) data from the card to add to
the Electronic
Program Guide (EPG). Then I discovered that
one must
install MythWeb for the EIT data to make it through via the plugin for EPG
in Kodi. Seems weird to me, but ok, I went to install MythWeb.

Oddly, this is where I had the most trouble, constantly receiving this
error message:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query_col() on null in /path/to/mythweb/modules/backend_log/init.php on line 15

The top net.search hit is likely to
be this bug ticket
which
out points out
that this is a horrible form of an error message to tell you the equivalent
of “something is strange about the database configuration, but I’m
not sure what”.

Indeed, I tried a litany of items which i found through lots of
net.searching. Unfortunately I got a bit frantic, so I’m not sure which
one solved my problem (I think it was actually quite obviously multiple
ones :). I’m going to list them all here, in one place, so that future
searchers for this problem will find all of them together:

• Make sure the PHP load_path is coming through properly and
  includes the MythTV backend directory, ala:

  setenv include_path “/path/to/mythtv/share/mythtv/bindings/php/”

• Make sure the mythtv user has a password set properly and is
  authorized in the database users table to have access from localhost,
  ::1, and 127.*, as it’s sometimes unclear which way Apache might
  connect.
• In Debian testing, make sure PHP 7 is definitely not in use by MythWeb
  (I am guessing it is incompatible), and make sure the right PHP5 MySql
  modules are installed.
  The MythWeb
  installation instructions do say:

  apache2-mpm-prefork php5 php5-mysql libhttp-date-perl

  And at one point, I somehow got php5-mysql installed and
  libapache2-mod-php5 without having php5 installed, which I think may have
  caused a problem.

• Also, read

  this
  thread from the MythTV mailing list as it is the most comprehensive
  in discussing this error.

I did have
to update the
channel lineup with mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/02/29/VMware.html

[ This blog was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

On last Thursday, Christoph Hellwig and his legal counsel attended a
hearing in
Hellwig’s VMware
case that Conservancy currently funds. Harald Welte, world famous for
his GPL enforcement work in the early 2000s, also attended as an
observer and wrote
an excellent
summary. I’d like to highlight a few parts of his summary, in the
context of Conservancy’s past litigation experience regarding the GPL.

First of all, in great contrast to the cases here in the USA, the Court
acknowledged fully the level of public interest and importance of the case.
Judges who have presided over Conservancy’s GPL enforcement cases USA
federal court take all matters before them quite seriously. However, in
our hearings, the federal judges preferred to ignore entirely the public
policy implications regarding copyleft; they focused only on the copyright
infringement and claims related to it. Usually, appeals courts in the USA
are the first to broadly consider larger policy questions. There are
definitely some advantages to the first Court showing interest in the
public policy concerns.

However, beyond this initial point, I was struck that Harald’s summary
sounded so much like the many hearings I attended in the late 2000’s and
early 2010’s regarding Conservancy’s BusyBox cases. From his description,
it sounds to me like judges around the world aren’t all that different:
they like to ask leading questions and speculate from the bench. It’s
their job to dig deep into an issue, separate away irrelevancies, and
assure that the stark truth of the matter presents itself before the Court
for consideration. In an adversarial process like this one, that means
impartially asking both sides plenty of tough questions.

That process can be a rollercoaster for anyone who feels, as we do, that
the Court will rule on the specific legal issues around which we have built
our community. We should of course not fear the hard questions of judges;
it’s their job to ask us the hard questions, and it’s our job to answer
them as best we can. So often, here in the USA, we’ve listened to Supreme
Court arguments (for which the audio is released publicly), and every
pundit has speculated incorrectly about how the justices would rule based
on their questions. Sometimes, a judge asks a clarification question
regarding a matter they already understand to support a specific opinion
and help their colleagues on the bench see the same issue. Other times,
judges asks a questions for the usual reasons: because the judges
themselves are truly confused and unsure. Sometimes, particularly in our
past BusyBox cases, I’ve seen the judge ask the opposing counsel a question
to expose some bit of bluster that counsel sought to pass off as settled
law. You never know really why a judge asked a specific question until you
see the ruling. At this point in the VMware case, nothing has been
decided; this is just the next step forward in a long process. We enforced
here in the USA for almost five years, we’ve been in litigation in Germany
for about one year, and the earliest the Germany case can possibly resolve
is this May.

Kierkegaard wrote that it is perfectly true, as the philosophers say,
that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other
proposition, that it must be lived forwards. Court cases are a prime
example of this phenomenon. We know it is gut-wrenching for our
Supporters to watch every twist and turn in the case. It has taken so
long for us to reach the point where the question of a combined work of
software under the GPL is before a Court; now that it is we all want this
part to finish quickly. We remain very grateful to all our Supporters
who stick with us, and the new ones who will join
today. That
funding makes it possible for Conservancy to pursue this and other
matters to ensure strong copyleft for our future, and handle every other
detail that our member projects need. The one certainty is that our best
chance of success is working hard for plenty of hours, and we appreciate
that all of you continue to donate so that the hard work can continue.
We also thank the Linux developers in Germany, like Harald, who are
supporting us locally and able to attend in person and report back.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/02/29/VMware.html

[ This blog was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

On last Thursday, Christoph Hellwig and his legal counsel attended a
hearing in
Hellwig’s VMware
case that Conservancy currently funds. Harald Welte, world famous for
his GPL enforcement work in the early 2000s, also attended as an
observer and wrote
an excellent
summary. I’d like to highlight a few parts of his summary, in the
context of Conservancy’s past litigation experience regarding the GPL.

First of all, in great contrast to the cases here in the USA, the Court
acknowledged fully the level of public interest and importance of the case.
Judges who have presided over Conservancy’s GPL enforcement cases USA
federal court take all matters before them quite seriously. However, in
our hearings, the federal judges preferred to ignore entirely the public
policy implications regarding copyleft; they focused only on the copyright
infringement and claims related to it. Usually, appeals courts in the USA
are the first to broadly consider larger policy questions. There are
definitely some advantages to the first Court showing interest in the
public policy concerns.

However, beyond this initial point, I was struck that Harald’s summary
sounded so much like the many hearings I attended in the late 2000’s and
early 2010’s regarding Conservancy’s BusyBox cases. From his description,
it sounds to me like judges around the world aren’t all that different:
they like to ask leading questions and speculate from the bench. It’s
their job to dig deep into an issue, separate away irrelevancies, and
assure that the stark truth of the matter presents itself before the Court
for consideration. In an adversarial process like this one, that means
impartially asking both sides plenty of tough questions.

That process can be a rollercoaster for anyone who feels, as we do, that
the Court will rule on the specific legal issues around which we have built
our community. We should of course not fear the hard questions of judges;
it’s their job to ask us the hard questions, and it’s our job to answer
them as best we can. So often, here in the USA, we’ve listened to Supreme
Court arguments (for which the audio is released publicly), and every
pundit has speculated incorrectly about how the justices would rule based
on their questions. Sometimes, a judge asks a clarification question
regarding a matter they already understand to support a specific opinion
and help their colleagues on the bench see the same issue. Other times,
judges asks a questions for the usual reasons: because the judges
themselves are truly confused and unsure. Sometimes, particularly in our
past BusyBox cases, I’ve seen the judge ask the opposing counsel a question
to expose some bit of bluster that counsel sought to pass off as settled
law. You never know really why a judge asked a specific question until you
see the ruling. At this point in the VMware case, nothing has been
decided; this is just the next step forward in a long process. We enforced
here in the USA for almost five years, we’ve been in litigation in Germany
for about one year, and the earliest the Germany case can possibly resolve
is this May.

Kierkegaard wrote that it is perfectly true, as the philosophers say,
that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other
proposition, that it must be lived forwards. Court cases are a prime
example of this phenomenon. We know it is gut-wrenching for our
Supporters to watch every twist and turn in the case. It has taken so
long for us to reach the point where the question of a combined work of
software under the GPL is before a Court; now that it is we all want this
part to finish quickly. We remain very grateful to all our Supporters
who stick with us, and the new ones who will join
today. That
funding makes it possible for Conservancy to pursue this and other
matters to ensure strong copyleft for our future, and handle every other
detail that our member projects need. The one certainty is that our best
chance of success is working hard for plenty of hours, and we appreciate
that all of you continue to donate so that the hard work can continue.
We also thank the Linux developers in Germany, like Harald, who are
supporting us locally and able to attend in person and report back.