I downloaded and installed the latest KnoppMyth from http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html.

I did a fresh install (wiping hard drive in the process) onto a reasonably high end machine (for what it's doing) with a Hauppauge PVR-350 (GeForce 7600GT, Athlon 64 3700+, 1GB RAM).

I plugged in my Time Warner cable line into the card (coax).

I plugged my TV into the card's AV Out (using the 9-pin to AV converter cable that came with the card).

After several tries and a couple of re-installs (wiping drive each time) I can now see the UI and watch TV.

Problem:
1) All channels have a white/black/checkered rectangle flickering at the top of the screen (fills horizontally, about 1/4 of the screen vertically).

2) Several channels I can get audio for but the video is just an ugly mess of colors, though I can sometimes see vague outlines of people in it (not sure what to call this type of display, it's not black/white static/noise).

When I do Top on the machine via SSH I'm running at about 2%-3% CPU utilization and about 8% memory utilization. I went through most of the logs and nothing stands out as looking like an error, but I don't really know which logs to look in or what I'm looking for.

I've been at this for about 4 hours and have a massive head ache from staring at the flickering image and at this point am mildly frustrated. I'm going to give it another shot tomorrow, hopefully with some feedback in this thread and if all else fails just re-install windows and use the software that the card came with.

Which nVidia driver are you using? Check /var/log/Xorg.0.log (See http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page ... ngLogFiles for other pertinent log files)

Do you have analog or digital cable from TW?

With what type of connection? S-Video, component, ?? Is VGA an option on your TV?

This sounds to me like a bad connection/cable(s)/splitter(s). Does the cable running to the 350 go through other devices first, such as a VCR? If you pull the cable from the 350 and hook it up to your TV is the display OK?

Ditto above. In case it is a configuration issue see http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page ... WatchingTV which usually covers ~95% of people's issues with configuring a tuner in MythTV.

Check /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog for any warnings/errors.

You've got plenty of horsepower for what you're trying to do. Have you tried the 350 in another computer or with another OS to verify it works properly? You can try it out with Mplayer:

Alt-X from the KM UI
type mplayer /dev/video0

Same problem?

Thanks for the list of things to try. Just before shutting everything down last night (after posting) I checked the stats section of MythTV and it showed 980MB / 1000MB of RAM being used. When I did "shutdown now" it spammed me with a bunch of command prompts and eventually I gave up on waiting and just powered the machine off. This morning when I turned it on the black/white checker boxes were gone from the top.

I haven't checked the channels that were "scrambled" or whatever you call that but I'll be looking into it tonight when I get home and then run through your list of suggestions if it's still a problem. Thanks!

Couldn't find a driver version in any of the logs, though I'm not sure what exactly I'm looking for. I just did a grep on nVidia.


Is it possible to find out without calling them?

9-pin out on the TV Tuner card which goes to a converter cable that converts it to red/white/yellow cables that then plug into my TV. VGA is not an option.

This problem has gone away but the cable goes from wall to splitter (other half to modem) to computer which then goes to the TV. The same cable was plugged into cable box before that and it worked great.

I have been through everything there and I still can't receive quite a few of the channels, they are all scrambled looking. The ones I do get I get great now (restarting the box cleared up my other problem) but a good portion of the other "basic" channels like USA I simply can't see (audio seems fine).

Again, I don't know what I"m looking for but it appears fine.

Is there an easy way to test it with Windows? KnoppMyth is my only Linux box. Also, like I said, most everything works fine except the missing channels now.

Try:



The yellow RCA phono jack is a "composite" video connector. This is covered on the page slowtolearn pointed you to. Also see this Wikipedia article for a picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_connector


Based on the number of things you already didn't pick up from that page and the fact that you couldn't find the driver version in the log file I suspect you're not paying enough attention to the details. Possibly because you're rushing or just overwhelmed by the amount of information. Please go back and read it again more closely. Very often the details of how things go together won't sink in until the 2nd or 3rd pass.

For example looking at which _specific_ channels you're having trouble with (which you haven't bothered to tell us) and comparing them to where the frequency standards differ the most should tell you if you've just selected the wrong frequency set. The differences between standard us-cable and us-cable-irc are subtle enough that most channels will come in but a few will be roached. Playing with fine tuning on those channels will also often reveal this. Also make sure you eliminate any potential interference sources of interference (That old VCR that's in the circuit could cause problems even if it's switched off.) and haven't made any of the other common mistakes like scanning for SDTV channels even though you have a downloaded program guide.