Hello everyone!

I bought a nice new PVR-150 and finally got it working for local US Broadcasts in R5D1 after setting OPTIONS IVTV TUNER=50 in the /etc/modprobe.conf

Now, when I go to watch LiveTV the audio level is very low. Tried adjusting the 'ivtvctl -y volume=65535' which does not seem to have an effect (as a matter of fact the first time I tried it I got a seg fault - worked after reboot).

Did the 'cat /dev/video0 > test.mpg' thing with mplayer - the sound level from the card itself is LOW and approximately equal to what is coming out of "LiveTV".

I popped open an aumix window, restarted the frontend, entered Watch TV - then I swtiched to the mixer window and was able to get good sound quality by adjusting MASTER and PCM to near 100%.

The problem I seem to be having is that when I go in and out of "Watch TV" the mixer settings are automatically reset to low levels??

I've stored the levels in the asoundcfg file.. Is this behavior normal? Does MYTH reset the mixer? The Recording Profiles for LiveTV is set to 90% volume.

If there was a way to get it to run the 'alsactl restore' command inline with selecting "Watch TV" that would be an ugly (but working) workaround for this problem.

Am using an old recycled Compaq Deskpro EN Small Form Factor 733Mhz P3 - seems to have one of those "ADI Soundmax" AC'97 integrated sound chips on the motherboard..sounds play OK in other X apps..although this thing is a little underpowered for TUXRACER.

The sound identfies in ALSA as an intel810 sound chip? Seems to be working fine..just that the mixer is reset to lower values going in/out of LiveTV..

Any assistance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
John

The sound is controlled in at least two or three different places.

- The capture volume - this is what you've been setting with the recording profile
- The PCM volume - on some cards this is just an on/off, but in others it really works
- The Master output volume - this is the final "knob" inside the computer

The volume you hear is the multiplicative result of all of these, plus whatever other pieces you upstream (A/V receiver, speakers, ...)

You've already got the capture volume under control, but you need to setup/set the internal volume controls. See the setting page at:

Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> General -> 3rd screen

Enable internal volume control, pick the appropriate mixer settings, and whether to use your Master or PCM volume control.

Now go and watch Live TV and use the '[' and ']' (left and right square bracket) keys to adjust your volume.

Right, got it - thanks for your help - I swear I had been through all the frontend screens before but I stumbled across this last night at like 11:30PM - works like a charm now.

I completely redid my setup and put the machine in the living room. It is working with the following hardware:

Compaq Deskpro EN P733 SFF
Intel i810 sound
Linksys WMP54G v4.1 (aka "rt61") wireless NIC (compiled driver from CVS)
PVR-150 decoder (added tuner option)
nVidia GeForce FX5200 (changed to tv-out XF86Config-4 sample file)
USB Keyboard/Mouse

I was forced to use the PCI version of the nVidia because the only AGP the Deskpro has is in the i815 integrated video chipset hardware..no external AGP slot.

I tried using an ATI Radeon 7K clone it was F-A-S-T using VGA with the "ati" driver in X but couldn't get the TVOUT working in X. Rather than recompling XFree86 from scratch so I could try the GATOS drivers I decided 8 hours of my life was worth another $60 for the nVidia card.

I made the XF86Config-4 nVidia TV OUT sample file my active XF86Config-4 file and added these options:

Options "TwinView"
Options "TwinView Orientation" "Clone"
Options "ConnectedMonitor" "TV, CRT"

to enable BOTH outputs simultaneously on the GeForce card..but after some lockups decided to revert to the settings in the original file (output to tV only).

I think the lockups were actually due to the rt61 or its CVS drivers but I can't prove it right now..for whatever reason the lockups have stopped now.

The default rt61 driver that came preloaded with R5D1 segfaulted when I tried to "ifconfig ra0 up" so I recompiled "rt61" open source driver from CVS...copied the new module over top of the one in module "extra" directory and was pleasantly surprised when it started working.

For whatever reason I had specified the WEP options in the setup dialogs and they weren't taking effect. Added a shell script to set iwconfig options and WEP keys, then added an "up /etc/network/wep.sh" line to the /etc/network/interfaces file to postconfigure the "rt61" card.

Next I will be working on seeing that I've gotten all of the acceleration I can get out of the GeForce (seeing as I've only got 733Mhz CPU) and setting up MythGame probably.

Two jobs seems to be the max this little box can process simultaneously - one recording and one watching - after FINALLY getting it all to work I was disappointed last night to see choppy frames.

After running 'top' for a while and getting it sorted right I figured out that the "mythcommflag" process had kicked in looking for commericals in the background while it was recording another program - killing off process restored functionality - I suppose I'll have to tweak the commerical flagging stuff - or learn to live with it.

One thing I noticed is that in some modules the screen image (like with streaming) stays on the display for an extended period of time. Is anyone concerned about screen burn in? I am using traditional CRT TV..

Thanks to everyone for all of your help - and the developers for making a product with such a rich feature set! Still tinkering..

John

This page:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC#Proprietary_Binary

Shows how to enable the XvMC extensions in the frontend - I'm going to try running with this for a while to see if there is a performance enhancement for my nVidia card. Some forums I've read actually say XvMC for nVidia SLOWS DOWN performance unless 24bpp is set as the color mode? Anyway - with such a slow processor it's worth a shot..the video seems nice and smooth to me after the first few frames start up..of course the box isn't processing anything else at the moment.