Cecil and Dev crew, I want to thank you for all of your hard work. It is greatly appreciated. Knoppmyth is truly the best way to distribute Mythtv.

I'd like to begin this post with a listing of the hardware I am using

ASUS M2NPV-VM Motherboard
AMD X2 4200+ (dual core)
1 Gig RAM
PVR500
HD5000
2 160Gig Hard Drives with /myth mounted to a 300Gig LVM.

After snagging R5E50, I could not wait to load it up. I attempted an upgrade of my R5D1, but it didn't go well. It was late, I was tired and I'm not sure why. But one thing I knew was my Mythconverg database was not intact. I had quite a bit of stuff in there so I did something drastic. I grabbed another hard drive and did a clean auto install and decided to go forward sans my old database. I wanted Myth .20 pretty bad.

I have R5E50 up and running, however I have not been able to sort out my Serial Remote interface yet. Beyond that, I have two major issues.

IVTV

IVTV is very unstable to the point of being unusable for any serious TV watching. When watching tv the picture flickers and artifacts anywhere from constantly to every few minutes. I also notice faint rolling horzontal lines that weren't there with the ivtv in R5D1. It is truly in the recording because I tested the playback from another frontend and saw the same issues. I've done quite a bit searching and no luck on the solution.


HDTV

I also have a HD5000 card and set that up. When watching HDTV, mythfronend is at 53% CPU and Xorg is at 93% CPU. Thus the playback sometiimes lags behind. This didn't happen in R5D1 either. I'm using Standard XvMC with Deinterlace (Bob) and Enable OpenGL Vertical Sync.


Beyond that, the new Mythweb is super sexy with the added RRDTool graphing and the Mythfrontend Remote Control app.

At this point, I'm considering moving back to R5D1 as I lost my database when I moved with R5E50. If anyone has anything to add, please do so. Truthfully, if I could get my issues solved I'd stay with R5E50, but not having useable television will force my to roll back probably tomorrow.

I got a Restore Failed message when I completed setup but everything seems to be there except for my remote control. I have not done any serious TV watching yet, so I don't know about that yet. I have a PVR-350.

My database came back through fine, however.

I was very anxious for MythArchive because I never did get that working on R5D1 and it seems to be all here in R5E50. I got an error when I tried the web remote (i had it activated in settings) so I want to play with that today also.

R5E50 kicked my dog. 8-(

My Streamzap remote ceased to work, I lost audio on new analog captures and my Sempron 3100 suddently couldn't record analog and do anything else at the same time. Hours of futzing until the wee hours on Christmas morning were to no avail. Going back to R5C7 fixed everything, so I'm staying in the past for now.

What worked in R5E50 was really slick, though. Wish I could have stayed there.

I, too, really appreciate all the hard work that goes into KnoppMyth.

All worked great at my end. Had to adjust my sound configuration a bit (I have 2 sound cards) but only had to add an index=1 option for the onboard sound to match it up with my .asoundrc. TOP shows heaps better performance than my previous attempts at myth .20 which is a great effort. My database restored OK but it defaulted my DVD player to INTERNAL where I still prefer XINE. I like to ff/rew, skip chapters and love the zoom feature in xine. I use JFS as my myth file system and it doesn't seem to have a fsck.jfs which I will need to look into.

Have not yet tested XVMC, archive, vnc, games etc..

Allround great experience so far, great work again guys.

*EDIT*

VNC: Included in this release use mythtv as password (great idea)
JFS: Just aptget install jfsutils to add required bits and pieces (my prefered fstype).
XVMC: Search forums need to adjust xvmc library path.

Need to get MythArchive working no success at present. Still a great release.

_________________
--
2.4 GHz P4 - 1GB Ram - 200 GB HardDisk
2 x DVICO DVB-T Lite
nVidia 7300GT - DVICO PCI Remote - R6
Wifey loves it more than me.
--

To try to help today, I did a brand spankin new install of R5E50 to a new hard drive and didn't setup anything beyond the video source and the capture cards to see if I did something wrong. Well the good news is that the IVTV issue is still there, atleast it's consistent.

I posted an example of what my video is doing under IVTV (see my post above for reference).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkEbBOSk3t8

The artifacts and flicker in the video are exaclty what I'm seeing on my screen.

If anyone can identify what this is, please let me know so it can be addressed.

The Ether..

In pre-release tests, libmpeg2 and one field gave the best results. Can you give that a try?

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5
MythiC Dragon v2.0
Join the KnoppMyth Frappr!

Your frustration is understandable, but please keep in mind that unless you work with us to identify the specifics of the problem, there's little chance that your hardware will get much love in the next release, either

You say your Streamzap remote ceased to work. Did it work in E50 and then stop, or did it never work in E50? Did you re-run lirc-reconfig.sh as root and get different behavior?

You say you lose audio on new analog captures. Did you play them back on another system to see if the problem was with the source and not playback?

When your system "suddenly" couldn't record and do playback at the same time, did "top" indicate high CPU usage for any particular task? Was the system transcoding, or maybe commercial flagging in parallel with recording? What happened just before you noticed the problem?

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5
MythiC Dragon v2.0
Join the KnoppMyth Frappr!

Human, it looks as if you are correct on the Libmpeg2, onfield. Here are three TOP outputs sorted by CPU usage.

Libmpeg2, Onefield, no Opengl Sync

3451 mythtv 0 0 424m 290m 123m S 46 30.7 2:30.76 ythfrontend
3403 root 0 0 266m 250m 106m S 6 26.5 0:49.93 Xorg
3283 mythtv 0 0 291m 35m 10m S 1 3.7 0:05.25 mythbackend
1 root 0 0 1948 640 540 S 0 0.1 0:01.09 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
3 root 0 19 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0


Libmpeg2, Onefield, WITH Opengl Sync

3451 mythtv 0 0 429m 295m 125m S 50 31.3 7:15.71 mythfrontend
3403 root 1 0 265m 253m 106m R 28 26.8 5:34.35 Xorg
3283 mythtv 0 0 283m 35m 10m S 1 3.7 0:10.84 mythbackend
304 root 0 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.38 pdflush
3537 root 0 0 2236 1156 864 R 0 0.1 0:01.25 top
1 root 0 0 1948 640 540 S 0 0.1 0:01.09 init


XvMC, BOB, OpenGL Sync

3403 root 34 0 265m 253m 106m R 92 26.9 1:15.85 Xorg
3451 mythtv 0 0 429m 296m 125m S 58 31.4 3:44.36 ythfrontend
3283 mythtv 0 0 275m 35m 10m S 1 3.7 0:07.39 mythbackend
1 root 0 0 1948 640 540 S 0 0.1 0:01.09 init


HDTV is acceptable now..

That leaves my IVTV issue. Any Ideas? I'm going to roll it back to IVTV 8.1 then to 8.0 for testing purposes to see if that helps.

Woo!

I have no idea about IVTV, since I don't work with any IVTV devices. I do know from following the development posts that some people absolutely needed the newer IVTV versions to fix problems their hardware had with the earlier ones. I hope very much that there's some way to support all IVTV devices with the latest driver version.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5
MythiC Dragon v2.0
Join the KnoppMyth Frappr!

Human, thanks very much for your help.

Any IVTV Gurus in the house?

I downloaded ivtv 0.8.0 and 0.8.1, following the the CompileIVTV how to in the WIKI, in Step 1, there is no Kernel Source in R5E50. None that I could find anyway. When I attempt to make the IVTV driver, I get:

root@mythtv:~/ivtv-0.8.0# make
make -C driver all
make[1]: Entering directory `/root/ivtv-0.8.0/driver'
created ivtv-svnversion.h
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.18-chw-13/build M=/root/ivtv-0.8.0/driver modules
make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-chw-13'
make[2]: *** No rule to make target `modules'. Stop.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-chw-13'
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/ivtv-0.8.0/driver'
make: *** [all] Error 2

Anyone know when I can get Cecils kernel sources for 2.6.18-chw-13 so I could make the driver?

Thanks

EtherNut

My IVTV Issues - Fixed

Well, I believe I have solved my IVTV issue. Like many things, I came across the solution accidentally. I was running a continuous TOP to watch my processor when I noticed that there was a process still running that didin't look right after I had closed mythfrontend (there was no possibility of anything recording becuase this was a new, clean install). The process that was taking up 20% cpu was called something like "enc-ivtv-vbi". Weird I thought, then I remembered an option in myth to disable the recording of VBI information. I turned that off and shut the system down and went to dinner. When I came back, I booted up the system and went right into Watch TV. Whattayaknow, the artifacting was gone and aint been back since. Been about 3 hours now. After the fact, I ran across an entry in the IVTV FAQ below that indicates my issues. Since I have an older PVR500 I'm affected by the below I guess. I checked mythtv and the PVR card was setup to encode at 480x480. I changed it to 720x480 and alos noticed a slightly sharper image which was nice (since my screen is 96").

Quote from the IVTV FAQ Below:





My Serial IR Receiver Issues - Fixed

I also fixed the issue with lircd not working with my Serial IR receiver. What was busitng my chops was that everytime I'd run irw it would crash lircd. and the net time I'd run irw I'd get connection refused. when I woudl start lircd with "lircd -d /dev/lirc0" I could successfuly run irw and it would recognize my remote commands. This told me that my config files were correct atleast. Next I did a ls -la /dev/lirc* and this is what I saw:

crw-rw---- 1 root video 61, 0 Dec 26 20:31 /dev/lirc0
srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 Dec 26 20:31 /dev/lircd

Hmm, where is /dev/lirc ? So I added a symlink to the end of my /etc/init.d/bootmisc. It now looks like:

ln -s /dev/lirc0 /dev/lirc
setserial /dev/ttyS0 uart none
modprobe lirc_serial
/usr/sbin/lircd

This fixed my remote and upon reboot, it worked great.

You should not symlink /dev/lirc0 to /dev/lirc. Didn't surprised it worked after a reboot. The issue is udev used /dev/lirc0 instead of /dev/lirc/. Change your hardware.conf to use /dev/lirc0.

Thanks Cecil, got it. I looked at the hardware.conf file atleast 4 times and didn't see the device link. Doh!

R5E50 is working great now..

Thanks a bunch..

Ether..

Yeah, sorry -- I thought about that afterward. Problem is, I'm too much of a noob to be much help.



Never worked. Yes, I tried reconfiguring. I verified that the config file was written correctly. Then I uninstalled lirc entirely and tried to apt-get it, but there was an error with that process. I reinstalled E50 just to be sure, and had the same behavior. I couldn't find a log file to figure out what was going on (noobness issue).


Well that would have been smart. I verified all the sound levels, but didn't try playing on a different system. My old analog captures worked just fine.



Another noobness issue. I don't know how to track CPU usage. I can verify that there was no transcoding or flagging going on. When a program was being recorded on my analog card, all playback slowed down to about 1/5 of normal speed. I manually stopped the record, and all playback became normal. I started recording again, and playback slowed. Stopped recording... you get the idea. Didn't matter if I was playing back nuv, MPEG-4 or MPEG-2 files.

Heck, I don't even know what all of my hardware is off the top of my head. I know it's a Sempron 3100, unknown motherboard, Air2PC HD-5000, unknown analog card, Dynex DS-SC5.1 PCI sound card, 1 GB RAM.

I've got PuTTY on my Windows box now, so I can get into the myth box remotely -- so if someone tells me what to check for, I can do it.

You can check your CPU usage by accessing your box via SSH. Once on the console, type "top". Once top is up and running, hit Capital P to sort by CPU. The processes that are CPU hogs will be at the top. hit the "q" key to quit.