Hey all,

I've downloaded r5a16 and successfully installed it. The hardware is:

AMD Athlon 1800+
512 mb ram
Onboard video
Onboard audio
2 Tuners (a. WinTV PVR-150 b. WinTV-Gosomethingsomething)
monitor is a 61 inch dlp connected using PC-Input from onboard video

I'm really impressed how easy it has been to get this far. The problem arises when I run mythtv-setup. I have very little idea of what to put when setting up a capture device and therefore can't get a correct configuration. I'm worried about configuring the PVR-150 first and then i'll worry about setting up the second tuner.

I chose to use the mpeg (pvr-250/pvr-350) thinking that it was the same thing. For video device I set it as video0, even though there were around 30 options to choose video0 was the single option with choices for the default inputs (television, comp1, s-video, comp-3) I set the default input to comp1 since that's where my feed is going to be coming from, and the rest i used defaults.

For source, I created a zap2it account and successfully ran mythtvfilldb.

what happens is whenever I start mythtv and choose to "WATCH TV" the screen goes black and the sound shuts off(or there's just nothing to hear). The machine is not frozen because I can get back to a shell if i press ctrl+shift+F1 (or something like that). I've tried basically every variation of the settings I could using video0 and all produce the same black screen. Is video0 what I should be using? How do I tell which device is which tuner? The video feed is coming from an ipod video via composite cables and I know its good, because i can see it on other monitors.

Please shed some light on me here. If you could just post the configuration of a PVR-150 that would be very helpful, or help me understand what I'm missing, thanks a lot.

It is. You're like the 3rd guy today with the exact same question. WTH is confusing you all? PVR-250,350,150,500 ALL use the MPEG2 PVR option for tuner type and the IVTV drivers. Although I suspect that your confusion may be caused by the other YUV card in the system which uses the BTTV driver. Just to simplify your life I recommend taking taht card OUT for the moment. Get one thing working and then you'll know what a good setup look like.


I suspect that your problem starts HERE. Are you SURE that the PVR card is getting set up as video0 and NOT the YUV card? Those inputs don't sound right. I see SVIDEO 0 and 1, COMPOSITE 0 through 3, and TUNER 0 and 1 (the second tuner isn't really there except as a stub, since they use the same chip for the PVR-500). If you see a different set of options something is probably wrong.

The MythTV docs have more on the setup. http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO.html

Thanks for the help tjc

I just went out and bought an additional PVR-150 NON-MCE, for the remote. I took out all the existing tuners and now I just have installed the new PVR-150 NON-MCE. I did a complete reinstall of knoppmyth r5a16. When setting up capture cards I now do indeed see SVIDEO 0 and 1, COMPOSITE 0 through 3, and TUNER 0 and 1. I set the default to Tuner 0 and successfully ran mythfilldatabase. When creating an input source I was a bit confused, since there was 8 options and I'm sure my card does not have all of these inputs. I associated my channel listing with Tuner0 and Tuner1 and left the rest blank. Now when I run mythfrontend and click "Watch TV" it brings up a black static screen and the OSD shows [1 Tuner:0]. I checked channel 3 and 4 and both are the same static. When I press C to change inputs (thinking its the wrong tuner) the static screen pauses for a sec or two but nothing else happens. I know that the tuner's source is good because i've got it "Y-split" and the other monitor shows it fine. I've got the feeling like somethings misconfigured with the capture cards, but really I've tried all the combinations of options there could possibly be. Do I have to compile the ivth drivers or something with my new card?

Thanks in advance, and note to mods, I double posted this thread in MythTV installation, which I know is a big no-no. I'm sorry, but please feel free to delete the other thread and move this where you see fit.

Hi griffindj830,

Since you are just starting, may I suggest you go with the R5A26 as the support for the x50 cards is very good. With the A16 you will have to do a lot of extra work to get to the same level as A26 "out of the box"

Have a good Thanksgiving.
Mike

happy thanksgiving to you as well

I took your advice and used the a26 for this install. Everything went smoothly... up until the point came where I wanted to watch tv. I followed the instructions found on the wiki, and set up my pvr150 as a video device using default input of tuner0.

When I hit "Watch TV" the screen goes black. This is not the same as in my first post, however because after about a 10 second pause it comes back to the main Myth screen. It does this every time I hit watch tv. I beleive once it popped up an error message about "no vga something something" but I'm unable to replicate it. I'm gonna do some searching on this as I've yet to do on this most recent speed bump.

Good news is that my remote worked out of the box. Saweet! Now if I could only watch tv.

UPDATE

When using alt+tab to switch back to shell the console reads something like this when hitting "WatchTV" and timing out

Connecting to backend server: 127.0.0.1:6543 (try 1 of 5)
ReadStringList timeout (quick)
Unexpected response to MYTH_PROTO_VERSION
Changing from none to none


Any ideas?

Hi griffindj830,

Every once in awhile an odd one will slip in to the pie. Did you do install or upgrade? That message usually indicates the backend isn't running and if you go to the media labrary > select watch recordings, a message should come up to that effect.
You can restart the backend with:

Another thing that may cause the error is if you haven't gone through all your settings to make sure everything points to /myth/music /myth/??? . Then go into mythtv-setup > general and check for /myth/tv and the buffer is /cache/cache/ If you haven't done it yet, make the buffer 1gig less than what you get for the cache size obtained with df -h It needs to be owned by mythtv also ls -al /cache so it can write the ringbuffer.

Also, if there is anything else showing up as a problem, it is usually very obvoius if you use a browser and goto your knoppmyth box and look into the various pages. Just basicly test drive it around the block.

To see error messages, esc out of the frontend. Then do alt x to open a terminal, restart with mythfrontend and when something happens it will be captured in the terminal window. I do this as some things are not logged where I can find them.

I think you will be pleasently impressed in the end, just a couple of bumps getting started.

Mike

The backend was indeed not running. However I think this is caused somehow by when I choose "Watch TV". What I mean is when the machine first starts up from reboot, or i use mythbackend restart, I can view the mythweb. The mythbackend status from mythweb starts that the backend is running. When I hit "watch tv" the screen goes black and mythweb gives a php error


After my mythfrontend comes back with no error message displayed. I can't alt+tab because the front end wasnt started within a shell, and when I try to exit the mythfrontend it freezes at where it would normally tell you "Would you like to exit now, YES OR NO" but instead its a blank screen, and I can only return to mythfrontend by hitting ctrl+alt+F1 or something like that.

When using mythweb to schedule recordings it appears to work fine. However when I choose stream live recording it tells me blahblah.nuv file is empty, aborting, no suitable access module.

Somehow by mashing keys i found my self at a terminal inside a mock tv. When I view the log from inside here (mythbackend box) it says

Started recording "Today" on channel: 1004 on card$
Changing from None to RecordingOnly
Can't enable VBI recording
vbi: Invalid arguement.

When I scroll up in the log to about where the time I started hitting "watch tv" is reads similar

Changing from None to WatchingLiveTV
Can't enable vbi recording
vbi:invalid arguement
Couldn't read data from the capture card in 15 secs, stopping

It also mentioned something about channel checking failed, check channel 3. Something I overlooked is that my directv does not have a channel 3. Manually I created it as "Test Channel". Come to think of it, why do I even need my directv listings if I'm going to be using my directv box to change the channels regardless? After creating a channel 3 and hitting "watch tv" it gave me a screen saying that all alvailable tuners were recording and to delete one from manage recordings. After deleting all the recordings (the ones from when i used mythweb) i go back to the same black sod. The log still tells me the same

Can't enable VBI recording
vbi: invalid arguement

I'm gonna research on that, but that's just a recap of what i've done and where I am. Any ideas would be great.

Hi griffindj830,

Sorry, forgot to mention that little tid bit, channel 3. Channel 3 is ok as a default, unless you don't have a channel 3 in your zap2it list. Suggest trying to do mythtv-setup > input connections > page 2 or 3 > tuner0 and set the default channel to something that is real and you have in your listing. If you are unsure of the location, put it in both places

I am assuming analog at this point with the pvr-150 only.

See if that change will help.
Mike

Your plight sounds a lot like mine... I was lucky enough that it works now (also by means of key mashing )

Have a look at how I fixed mine, maybe you can get it working using the same settings I did (I also have a PVR-150).

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7101

As for card config, in my case it was /dev/video0, with tuner0 and under inputs, associate tuner0 with the zap2it data. edit:oops, that's assuming you're using the coax input. But I think you said your using the composite? use comp0 then

Good luck
crazyPSP

The card has all of these at least as internal stubs. You should ONLY be associating your video source with the one that's hooked to your feed. If you're bringing coax in from the wall that would be tuner-0, if you're bringing a pretuned signal in from the cable box that would be svideo-0 or composite-0. Tuner-1 does not really exist, it's just a stub because the PVR-150 uses the same chip as the PVR-500, so don't associate it with anything.

It may not be a problem with the tuner, it could be your overlay setting in X.
On a friend's machine I had to set the OpenGLOverlay option in the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 from "off" to "on" for his ATI Radeon 9600 because of a blank/black screen when watching video playback with mplayer, xine, and watching TV with myth.