[mythtv] Newbie observations

[Andrew Barber]

Here is a list of troubles I ran into running mythv on my system.

My system is a  Duron 800 on an Abit Kt7 board.  384 MB ram.  Debian 
Woody with a 2.4.16 kernel.
Video capture is a "Generic Peripherals" capture card - this is a bt7x8 
chip with a philips tuner.
Sound card is an ensoniq 1371, video is an nvidia geforce MX 200.  I 
used the latest debian packages for mythtv (as of friday last week).

This first problem I had was audio.  I have OSS drivers (or at least I 
believe them to be OSS drivers).  XMMS played back fine with these 
drivers, although I don't think I've tested record with the drivers. 
 When I ran mythtv, it would complain that it couldn't set the sample 
rate and said something about exiting, but the program didn't actually 
stop.  Also, video didn't come up.   I finally decided that the message 
about the audio must be causing some sort of problem, so I installed 
ALSA drivers instead of my OSS drivers.  This cured the audio problem 
and video finally appeared.

There are two problems here.  First, the program should actually quit if 
it says so.  I was thrown off track by it's behavior.  The second 
problem is that I think the program should be able to run without sound, 
if for no other reason, to test the video portion of the program.  

So I finally got video and audio working, but I had choppy video and 
audio was out of sync.  I tried changing resolution from 480x480 to 
480x360 and I got a crash.  (btw - i am using rtjpg).  240x240 worked, 
but the OSD text didn't scale and it was clipped.  I believe the audio 
was still out of sync at this point, but I'll have to verify that.  I 
also have to verify if my CPU is being maxed out and causing sync 
problems.  I also have the blue face problem, but I just need to update 
my nvidia drivers which I'll try tonight.

That's all for now.   This is really cool software, so keep up the good 
work.  I'd contribute to the coding, but I'm not well versed in c++. 
 Plus I have a 250 year old house and a 2 month old son that suck up 
alot of my time :)

Andy