Bought this A180 card at Fry's a few nights ago. I got it to detect in R5E50 but still need to make some prescribed changes to /etc/modules and some other file (forget at this moment) to make sure the saa7134-dvb module loads.

I was able to hook it to a comcast cable source and get it to scan and find the unencrypted QAM channels but some channels will either cause mythfrontend to hang or cause it to crash completely.

This is running on a VIA EPIA M10000 (1 GHz processor) and I have VIA XvMC enabled. My guess at the moment is that the hanging/crashing channels are probably the HD feeds. I've been looking at other posts and saw some articles that say Comcast strips the channel meta data

Down to the questions:

1. I want to find out what is really behind the hanging/crashing. One of the channels I'm getting is giving me stuttering video (and this is with VIA XvMC turned on). Here is a little clip from top

top - 01:41:08 up 30 min, 2 users, load average: 2.83, 2.58, 1.70
Tasks: 80 total, 1 running, 79 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 87.4%us, 11.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 1.3%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 220868k total, 217100k used, 3768k free, 508k buffers
Swap: 337356k total, 102312k used, 235044k free, 113280k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2921 mythtv 0 0 328m 77m 52m S 73.5 35.7 10:45.51 mythfrontend
3082 mythtv 0 0 240m 22m 8748 S 11.9 10.3 1:39.68 mythbackend
2862 root 0 0 198m 42m 42m S 8.9 19.8 1:20.61 Xorg
3117 root 0 -5 0 0 0 S 4.0 0.0 0:30.90 saa7133[0] dvb
2569 mysql 9 0 126m 4700 2212 S 0.7 2.1 0:07.70 mysqld
187 root 0 0 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:00.77 pdflush
188 root 0 0 0 0 0 D 0.3 0.0 0:01.92 kswapd0

mythfrontend at 73.5% - ouch. Could those certain channels be the HD and it's just killing CPU?

2. I was trying to follow another article to get the channel data right but can't find this program called atscscan, where has it gone since R5B7?

3. Should I consider some more horsepower for the A180? I was considering getting the new EPIA EX board when it is released later this month or Feb but the processor will only be 1.5 GHz. If this card is giving me direct mpeg video then why is XvMC choking?

Thanks,

AC