Ok I have decided to take the plunge into debian/mythtv. It didn't hurt that Fry's just opened in Atlanta and ran so many specials and rebates on their Grand Opening day (Friday) that I have a lot of new equipment for less than a TIVO. Here are my specs first to get a good picture in your head.

XP 1800 + ECS K7VTA3 mobo
1gb pc2700 Ram (2*512)
120gb 8mb 7200rpm WD EIDE Hard drive
Ati AGP 7000 32mb card w/ S-video out
Onboard lan/sound
Generic DVD-Rom

Now that we have that out of the way, here's my problem. I did an initial loadup of Knoppmyth R4V4.1 after downloading and burning it to disk. It initialises perfectly on the first run and even formats my new hard drive. Mad props and all that to the keepers of the Knoppmyth flame. After doing an automatic install it asks for the date/time/zone. No matter which way I try it doesn't take the time zone properly. At the end of the install it allowed me to change it again and this time it took beautifully. I even get the full loadup after reboot with Knoppmyth starting up. It looks great on my TV. I change the theme settings to see what they look like and still love it. Here's the problem though.

I try placing a CD I burned of Divx AVi's in the dvd rom and I get nothing. The DVD even locks up until I manually have it unmount and eject from the command line. I throw in music CDs and the same problem. I try changing the directory MythTV looks for video files and it finds the files, says it's loading for a split second and then remains on the video listing screen. I try copying different tyes of files to the video directory on the HD(after changing it back to there) and still I get nothing. I thinks this relates either to MythTV or Mplayer but I could really use some help as I wait for my TV tuner cards to show up.

So far I can't get anything I throw at it to actually play. I've managed to make myth realize it's there but that's the best I got, not even a hint of playing. Thoughts anyone?

I'm thinking by the end of this weekend I may need to try a manual install from scratch. Does MythTV work on Xandros well?

Cesman: In all seriousness I hope I put this in the right place for this question man.

I would quit the frontend and then run the frontend from an xterm and see what kind of errors show up when it fails.

There is a debian mythtv repository that should work on xandros.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Ummm, what exactly do you mean by quit the front end? You mean escape out to the Xterm? Xterminal says the file is there. It shows me the name. I'm super noob at the *nix bit for this so not sure exactly how to go about getting this done. As for errors, when we tried to run it we got zero errors from the terminal though it wouldn't start properly there either.

Back to the drawing board for now.

keep hitting esc till you see do you want to exit frontend. then say yes then right click and choose xterm. in the xterm type mythfrontend. then go try to play the file then esc back out till you see the xterm window again and see what is in it.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Thank you for walking me through it. It would seem that my tv out card is not recognized as a media device for playing movies. I'm using an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP 32mb card that I picked up for $50 because it has an svideo connection. I'm going to search the forums real quick to see if there is a way to fix this. I'll get back with any possibles I come across unles you know something right off the top of your head that I should do.

get something other than an ati card. Sorry to say this, but that is the only solution that I know of at this point. ATI tvout is pretty much non existant in linux, since they won't release the specs for the developers to put it in the drivers.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Remind me to beat my friend viciously. As we sat there in the store he kept repeating, ATI works great in linux, don't worry about it. As I sit here reading the problems with my particular card I am less than happy, especially since I already threw away the box. Sigh, time to go find someone on the ars to trade with.

Thanks for all of your help so far guys.