I've been living on R5A12 for a few weeks using it solely for recording digital television (not all of it HD, some SD) using a pc2000 HDTV tuner card and a 30" Toshiba HDTV (CRT).

Here are some observations (and some bugs I suspect):

1) Myth's general lack of robustness dealing with weak or non-existant DTV signals.

No on screen UI indicates "Trying to tune channel X". A countdown timer would be nice as well perhaps. Sometimes, it seems Myth completely locks up (the frontend) and I have to ssh in remotely and restart mythfrontend.

2) Myth can fail to record a program but will nonetheless leave the program in the database as a "zombie".

You see it as a recorded program but you cannot play it or delete it. (I suppose from a command line you could use some SQL commands to remove it...).

This seems related to the above since I believe the show in question failed to record because the signal was non-existant or too weak on the specified channel.

3) As others have pointed out, an analog card will at least output noise/snow when failing to tune, a digital card (at least at the driver level) outputs nothing.

For this reason, you get no UI, no "Info" overlay, etc.... One might imagine the driver could output a "black stream" or perhaps blue or perhaps a atream indicating, "no signal", etc. Of course where the driver is unwilling, Myth could handle this scenario by spoofing one of the aforementioned methods.

4) Myth's "achillean" dependancy upon Zap2It (not specific to HD).

While the use of Zap2It is both convenient, and cleverly implemented, if there are any problems connecting to Zap2It you have an essentially inoperable Myth box. Specifically, I'm alarmed at the dependancy upon Zap2It for the channel list.

Why no autoscan? Why can't I hand-enter "65" or whatever from the keyboard or remote and get Myth to at least try to tune to that channel (in this example I'm assuming channel 65 is not "known" to Myth)?

I understand I can hand-edit the channel file from a command line prompt but it would seem there could be something sort of in-between.

5) For some channels (KQED in my area) Myth does not activate the audio.

Someone suggested I hit the "+" key to cycle through the audio channels and this, fortunately worked. However, when cycling through all the audio channels in this way I never come back upon the "silent" audio channel. In other words, it seems Myth is not choosing the wrong audio channel, it is not by default choosing any channel at all.

6) The "F" key for onscreen control of Hue, Brightness, etc. does nothing.

And to bad too because the DVI output from my nVidia 5200 card it woefully dark. Perhaps this is not specific to HD? I actually never knew this feature existed (until I had to ).

7) A means to show signal strength for a given channel from within Myth would be wonderful.


None of these are meant to be rants or whiny — most have workarounds — these are just observations and things I expect will improve in time.

I agree about the signal strength and the displaying something when you can't lock onto the signal. The mythbackend.log tells you that can't lock on, so (in theory) if it gets this message it should be able to display something.

I had just put a DVB-T card in my KnoppMyth box and was getting the info from scanning through Myth-setup and it was locking on, but when I went to Watch TV it was having problems with the display.

If as you suggested a message about the signal strength or a key to display it, I would have known this was the problem, I just thought my box was locking up. Very confusing.

That is why I am getting the TV man to come and quote and test my signal for me, but you didn't really need to know that.

If the F key is not working for you then make sure you have a video driver installed that supports xv and that you have the checkmark to use xv color controls checked, then the f key will work, though using nvidia-settings to adjust the picture is probably a better solution for nvidia users.

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

Xsecrets

1. Improved in 0.18

2. Fixed in 0.18

3. HDTV receivers work pretty much the same way.

4. Listings can still be "screen scraped" but Data Direct is so much nicer

5. KQED problem is known. The + key cycles among three sound channels. It just picks the wrong one. Maybe will be fixed in the future.

6. Dunno. DVI issue?

7. Nice idea.

I think the 0.18 Myth upgrade is worthwhile. You could compile it and install it by hand on your Knoppmych box, or you could wait for Cecil and Dale to release the update to KnoppMyth. Personally, I would NOT bother trying to compile it, if you get my drift.

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