Restart MythTV frontend via Remote

This one should help out any non-technical MythTV user. The most common issue I run into is when my wife goes to control the frontend and it has lost sync with the backend (most of the time because I was working on something and forgot to check on things when I was done). Simply restarting the frontend fixes these issues, but she doesn't know how to ssh in and handle this task, so lets make a button (or series if you want to be safe) on the remote do it for her.

Create a file in /usr/local/bin, call it whatever you want, I called mine restart-myth. Include the following in that file:

# /bin/bash
killall mythfrontend.real
DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/mythfrontend --service &


Then
sudo chmod +x <file from above>

Now in your ~/.lirc/mythtv file, we are going to add a button to handle our restarts. Start by copying one of the other button blocks, and modifying it to fit your needs. Here are my end results:

begin
remote = AntecFusionMCE.conf
prog = irexec
button = power
button = CLEAR
repeat = 0
config = restart-myth
end


Of importance here, I used 2 buttons because I want to avoid mistakes, so the user will need to hit power followed by clear. Most of your other blocks will say mythtv in the prog, we need irexec here to execute the script we made earlier. Lastly the script you created earlier is referenced in the config.

When everything is done you need to restart a few things, save anything you have opened and don't want to lose. For 9.10 run the following:

sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart
sudo service gdm restart

Anything before 9.10 run this instead:

sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart


Plans are to introduce something close to this functionality into the Mythbuntu-Control-Centre for the Lucid release. Feel free to leave some feedback we are interested in what buttons people like for this option and ways they would want to handle avoiding accidental restarts.