To start off, here's my system specs:

AMD Athlon 850/640MB Ram
Asus A7v (VIA KT133)
ATI Rage Fury 32MB vid card
Hauppauge WINTv PCI

The first problem I had is that I couldn't get my tv-out to work. I fixed that by using XVFB (i'll post a how-to for that, for anyone who cant get tv-out to work! ) Then, I had a problem with XMLTV, in that the one included with this release of knoppmyth is outdated, so I had to update that so I could fetch tv listings (developers should post a howto for people who aren't linux-savvy, or I could...) So, now I can see myth on my tv, and all is well and good. I can record videos by selecting them in the recording menu, so my tv tuner is working well enough (picture quality isnt great but I can fiddle with that on my own). Anyways, here is my big problem:
When I go to "TV" and select "Watch TV", or I go to "Recordings" and select one of the recordings there to watch, or I insert a VCD and try to play that...I get a black screen, and my box locks up and I have to reboot (no, I can't switch consoles, or control - alt - backspace to kill X). I should mention however, that when I go to "recordings" that I *can* see a little full motion video of the recording I have highlighted, so it seems it can display *small* video. So, I'm at a loss here? If anyone can offer any help it'd be much appreciated!

Thanks

Do mean something like this http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=250
My experience w/ the system locking when trying to watch live TV is incorrect card and tuner type. Do you have MythVideo configured to use MPlayer to watch the VCD? If it is locking hard when trying to do CPU intensive operations, perhaps it is the system?

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Yep, like that


Well I just have a plain ol' BTTV card, Hauppauge...as I said I *can* record tv, even though the quality isn't all that great. So it's not that it's an incorrect card or tuner type (besides that tuner script finds and auto-configs it on boot, so...)


I haven't explicitly configured that, no....is it not set up by default?



I'd agree with you if it locked when it was capping/encoding a show, or transcoding from RTJpeg to MPEG4 (which I've done a few times), or anything else that I've done...but it doesn't. The only times it locks is when I try to play a video of any kind, or watch tv :/

Weird thing about this is, is that I have basically identical hardware to others who have had no problems at all in getting myth up and running great so I dont know :S

don't be too quick to come to the conclusion that it's not wrong card/tuner type. I have see other people with partial working systems or sometimes working systems that had the problem corrected when they specified their card/tuner type. I would check the cardlist and manually specify your card/tuner type just to see if it makes a difference.

Ok I'll give that a try...here's hoping (though it's strange it would work with the wrong driver...by work I mean showing me tv + sound, etc)

yes it's strange, but I have heard numerous people say it works but has problems sometimes, or works but is one channel off, stuff like that.

K I got tv to work, sorta....I changed the sound card I had from a Vortex2 to a SBLive....even though I had properly compiled the modules and loaded them for the vortex2, I guess myth didnt like it much? :S Anyways I have a few more issues to work out now. The major one is that my live tv output stutters (pauses, etc)...which it shouldn't cuz I have livetv set to use RTJpeg, and I have an athlon 850 w/640MB ram, and from what i've read I should be able to watch livetv with that by using RTJpeg. So, that doesn't work, I figured i'd try recording something. Well, it records fine, but playback is again jerky as hell (and yea I've tried the jitter correction options and such)...so I figured my cpu was just overtaxed when I was capping (even when capping in RTJPeg!) and so it had dropped frames. But, when I copied the capped .NUV to my windows box and played it, it ran fine, no dropped frames or stuttering....so wtf??? Only 2 things I can think of off hand: 1) I turned on XVMC (x virtual motion compensation I think?) during install...and I thought my ATI Rage Fury supported that (I know it does that in windows), but maybe not in linux? 2) I am using XVFB (x virtual frame buffer) for my tvout...think using the FB driver over the r128 (rage 128) driver could cause it?

Any ideas guys?

I would suggest trying the ATI drivers to see if that provides an improvement. I don't know that it will, but I have not had great luck working with the linux Virtual frame buffer for full motion video.

I think the problem is that you are effectively asking the CPU to draw each frame then hand it off to the video card for display, vs telling the video drivers what format to display, and sending it a stream of data that the card draws each frame of, and flipps them in as necessary.

However I could be wrong, so if it does no better, you're only out the time of trying, and up the experience of learning one more way things don't always work.

-Rusty

Yea I know what XVFB is doing in essence, but if I want TV-OUT, it's the only way to go with ATI, esp with the older cards. I haven't found drivers yet that will allow me to do tv-out with my card. Something to take into consideration is that I also use Geexbox, which is a boot-from-cd all-in-one media player, using mplayer (very nice project actually)...and it doesn't use ATI drivers, it uses frame buffer as far as I can tell, and it outputs any kind of full screen video BEAUTIFULLY, so I have no idea?! I was thinking of using the mplayer settings geexbox is using and setting mythtv to use those settings? I just dont know how to set the commands mythtv passes to mplayer to play tv. Do you know?

Well two things.

1) ati cards ARE NOT supported by xvmc so turn it off. It doesn't do you any good unless you are recording with a hardware card anyways. RTJPEG is not MPEG2 and will not be accelerated.

2) You may want to look into xv. I'm not sure that the framebuffer has xv support, I'm not sure what the options are here, but its a direction to research.

Thanks man, I turned off xvmc, no difference there...and as for framebuffer, well it doesnt have xv support.

Now, DIRECTFB on the other hand is hardware accelerated FB, but it's complicated as hell to set up (and i'm not exactly a linux noob). The other direction I was looking is to try and compile the gatos-devel drivers cuz they have tv-out support, but even though I follow the instructions exactly (compiling against XF86 4.3.0 source tree) I get errors everywhere....I'm thinking of just picking up a GF4 MX440 with tv-out

My TV viewing used to work pretty good. Then one day when I try to watch tv or a recording I get a black screen. Sometimes I can exit (esc or exit button) sometimes I cant and have to reboot. What is funny is that I have done nothing in to the hardware setup. Also I can view the little preview window the recordins section but if I try to play them I get a black screen.