My Myth box is up and runnig after a fashion now and I'm getting black screens after a short while of watching live TV.
Until now, i'd only had live TV running briefly to check it was working ok.

To a point is it... Live TV, sound in sync... unfortunately after about five mins and a couple of channel changes it freezes, then the screen goes black and the only thing I can do is either press the reset/power button or I can press ctrl-alt-F3 to get the command prompt up.

Now, I've made sure my cache is not 'overflowing. On my 40g test drive the install has given me 4.3 g cache, I've set how big it can grow to a conservative 3g in mythTV-setup. Should be fine, so is this freeze up due to the VIA bug?

Thanks in advance for advice.

By the way, this is my rig atm:
AMD Sempron 2600 @ 2800
Asus A7V880 (VIA K880 chipset)
Happautage Nova-T
Soundblaster Live 5.1
Creative Nvidia ti4600

Out of this little lot, i think it's probably the VIA chipset... I think there have been problems with the memory controller or something...

try going into the bios and slowing down the memory speed.

not that I have any solutions, but this is not the symptoms of "the" via problem. Though it could still be a via related problem.

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

Xsecrets

My box (with a via motherboard) would most often lock hard when left on the show recordings screen with the little preview window running. I installed memtest and it showed I had memory problems which changing the memory speed in the bios fixed. After fixing that I no longer had lockups.

Mmm, what timings are you using? I have 512 of PC2700 which is 1-1 with the cpu fsb (at default of 333mhz.)
I'll underclock it a bit when I get home tonight. FIngers crossed.

I'll post how I get on!

Thanks for the starting point.

BTW, How does this differ from the VIA hardware bug?

Im 15000 km away from my box and will be for the next 2 weeks, so im sorry I cant get that information at the moment.

The via bug is generally a hard lock, meaning no console no ssh nothing there is just nothing you can do till you force reboot the machine.

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

Xsecrets

That's certainly reassuring X, at least I don't seem to have that problem. Quite a relief. Phew! Especially as I was looking on the internet last night and socket A boards are becoming quite hard to come by on many UK sites....

Cheers for the reply Greg, I guess I can have a fiddle with my BIOS unaided

but thanks anyhow. Hope your 1500 km away is a nice holiday! ... and your Mythbox records all your shows

Well, I had a tinker with my BIOS. Not turned down the fsb as of yet.
I made sure that there were no conflicts... (I inadvertently had got the onbord sound turned on and I'm using my SoundBlaster Live... so turned that off and reduced the graphics apature to 64MB)
All seemed good, turned it on, flicked to live TV and ok for about 10 secs... then black screen. A reboot which normally sorts this out didn't work....

I'm also wondering if it is the hdd.
It wouldn't format when this disk was in Windoze...

So, in short it's gotten worse.
Ideas?
Ta

Just an update really:
The night before last, I swapped my components into my Abit AN7 mobo and the hdd failed. Guess it was on the way out.

It certainly would explain the problems I've been having.

I'm going to try and borrow a 'spare' hdd from the techies at work. Hopefully they will have a hdd to lend me so I can confirm my suspicions that it was indeed this hard drive wearing out.

So I'm going to buy myself an Seagate Spinpoint 250g hdd!

There is some good news to come out of this...

(Fingers crossed that this will solve it!)

Well, got my new hdd. I went for a Samsung spinpoint 250 pata drive.
Install of R5A26 went well but I've run into more problems. Think it must be the motherboard as well. D'oh!

I'm getting blocked lines on some channels and sound break up, whil on others it's crystal clear then I got the dreaded black screen, but I can 'escape' out to the menu.

I'll move the tv card around, try a reinstall, but not feeling hopeful.

Have you seen this: http://www.hauppauge.com/html/lockups.htm#MOMLIST

Thanks for the reminder.

I had seen it before and I had installed the 4in1 board drivers before, but as I had RMA'd the original board I had (dodgy memory controller) I haven't done it with this one.

Might just make all the difference. Sometimes it's the simplest things.

I'll give it a go later. Fingers crossed.
Cheers

So reinstalled R5A26, and it was a bit fiddly to set up the DVB-T card (god knows why, it was relatively easy on 22... I had to do all the transports manually and the card now thinks my signal strength has disappeared!)

But apart from some blocky lines on the some channels (strangely BBC mostly) it all appears to be there and working.

I'm looking into the other possibles suggested on the Hauppage page as I obviously want the best I can achieve through all this...

I'm wondering if DMA is not 'on properly'.

Well, I'll let you all know if there are any more developments.

Hopefully, there won't be any more 'problems'.

Probably due to the reversion in mythtv version.