Hello everyone.

I've been a Knoppmyth user for awhile now and have taken the plunge into the HDTV world. Previously I was using a Motorola DCT-242x digital cable box fed into a PVR-250, going out to a standard analog set. My Mythbox has an AthlonXP 2800 chip, 120gb ide133 hard drive, 512M of ram and an Nvidia GeforceFX 5900LE card.

Yesterday I bought an excellent Sharp Acquos 32" LCD tv. It supports everything from HDMI, Composite and S-Video inputs. I'm about to connect it via HDMI to my new Comcast (Motorola) DCT-6200 DVR.

I'm wondering how to fit Myth into the mix. Since my Nvidia card has a DVI connector on it, I could use a DVI-HDMI convertor and feed my Acquos video that way. Then I could use the Firewire out from the Motorola DVR to feed the Myth box video in. Audio in this configuration *should* be through optical SPDIF.

My concern is this...will an AthlonXP 2800 have enough grunt to pull this off smoothly? My Nvidia card should handle XVMC nicely at the expense of a decent OSD. Also I'm worried about what channels the DVR will be willing to pipe through the firewire. Plus, I have no clue on how to get firewire setup to begin with. I also need to figure out how to get the right resolution out to the TV (1368x768 or so).

Tips and suggestions are definitely welcome.

You should find some other helpful stuff on the forum, but real quickly: (a) an Athlon 2400 can play back HD, but only with XvMC help (and that can affect stability in addition to the OSD weirdness); (b) you should only get "in the clear" channels via FireWire (i.e. no pay channels) but if you're lucky like Xsecrets it might work for all channels, (c) MythTV 0.19 has FireWire as one of the tuner options in mythtv-setup.

Short status update here..

So far I've gotten firewire working, and I had no idea it'd handle the channel change via the firewire rather than having to use an irblaster. That's a big relief actually because hassling with my irblaster makes me nuts.

Playback is kinda flaky for whatever reason. I was able to flip through a few channels and eventually something crashed. Not sure if it was the frontend or the backend, but it's not very happy with HD.

A few days ago I rebooted it and since then I get a black screen on playback and it fails back to the menu selections in the frontend after about 10 seconds or so. Back to the drawing board.

Can you please post your mythtv-setup firewire settings? I.e. port, node, using broadcast, etc?

_________________
Currently running: R5.5, HD5000 x 2, PVR150, Athlon 64 3000+, Chaintech VNF4, 1GB RAM, 2 x 250GB in LVM, MSI NX6200TC -> AA 9A60 -> HDTV

Port zero, node 1, using broadcast. I have it plugged into the first of 2 firewire ports (left to right) on my mythbox, and the first of 2 of the cable box. The cable box is a Comcast Motorola 6412 III DVR. It's a nice box and has USB, Sata, Ethernet, Firewire, Composite, SVideo and RF outputs on it.

I'm still trying to pin down why it black screens on me now, I had it working the other day and haven't changed a thing on it.

if you are getting black screen there should be some indication of why in the /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log file.

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

Xsecrets