Every once and a while mythfrontend gets stuck for one reason or another.  Now when this happens I just ssh into the mythbox and restart gdm.  This almost always brings thing back up and running.  While I do usually have my laptop about its still a bit of a pain to break out of TV mode and start sshing in.  Seeing this gave me the idea to put my power button to good use but I felt the script was overly complicated given how well the gdm restart worked.  But since  restarting gdm requires root privileges and thus a password to run I was stymied.  Until I learned about the sudoers file that is.  Editing this file lets you gives users the ability to sudo certain commands without a password – it actually does way more than that but its not relevant to the post.  Now if you are not careful editing sudoers can scrap your system so precede with caution.  Now on to the good stuff.  To edit sudoers use the following command.

sudo visudo

This will apply some basic sanity checking before you save the file; making it every so slightly more difficult to slag your system.  Anyway add the following line. (replace user_name with the user mythfrontend runs under)

user_name ALL=NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/gdm restart

Make sure to put this at the end of the file otherwise rules may override it.   That took me about half an hour and countless fiddle logout/login cycles.

Now add something like the following your your lirc file.

#Power Button
begin
    remote = remote_name
    prog = irexec
    button = Power
    config = sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart
end

Now after you logout and log back in your power button should restart gdm allowing you to ‘fix’ any frontend hanging issues from your remote.

*Note – This tip has no warranty or support.  If it deletes your files or blows up your computer don’t come crying to me.

Although I don’t use it much MythTV has a nice ‘Guide Screen’ where you can see what is coming up on TV.  And the remote I use for MythTV has a guide button on it so I figured I’d set it up so when you press it the ‘Guide Screen’ comes up.  There are a couple of things you need to do to set this up.

1. Have your remote setup to control MythTV. 
2. Check/Edit the MythTV keybindings – this is where you setup how keyboard shortcuts are interpreted by MythTV.
3. Edit your lircrc config file – this is where you setup what commands each button sends to MythTV.

One is outside the scope of this post so for the rest of the post I’ll just assume you have the remote setup and working.

Two is pretty easy.  Just open up MythWeb -> settings -> key bindings.

After some searching I found the following two shortcuts that concern the guide, the ‘TV Frontend -> Guide’ command and the ‘Program Guide’ jump point, shown below.

After some experimentation I determined that the ‘Program Guide’ jump point works anywhere but when you exit from the guide screen you are dumped back into the MythTV Main Menu.  The  ‘TV Frontend -> Guide’ on the other had only works if you are watching a show/recording but it pauses it before you enter the guide and when you exit brings you back to where you left off which is nice.  Now this is probably just a coincidence and may change in future MythTV versions but if you set both you actually get the best of both worlds.  If watching a show/recording it pauses for you and if your in the menu somewhere it still goes to the “Guide screen”.  So set both of these to the same key, I used S, and your half way there.

Step three isn’t bad but it depends on exactly how you have your remote setup. But I’ll outline the basic steps.

1. Find your ‘lircrc’ file its probably in /username/.mythtv directory
2. Add/modify an entry for the guide button – it should look something like this

# Guide button (EPG)
begin
    remote = YourRemoteName #Optional
    prog = mythtv
    button = RemoteButtonName
    config = S
end

And that’s it, after a quick reboot you should be able to press the guide button and have the ‘Guide Screen’ come up.

*Note – This tip has no warrenty or support.  If it deletes your files or blows up your computer don’t come crying to me.