[mythtv] Experiences

David Watson mythtv-dev@snowman.net
Wed, 09 Oct 2002 10:16:31 -0400


I figured I would add my list of gotcha's to the archives for other
people's benefit. First, my experiences with Linux are at least
5 years old.  I'm much more comfortable with BSD, so some of
this might be obvious to Linux veterans.

Muting the line-in took me a while to figure out.  I went through
several mixers that thought that muting meant setting the levels
to zero.  alsamixer finally did the trick, but it took me a while.
Looking at the FAQ, I see something new has been added about using
ALSA and 'Capture,' unfortunately it still doesn't make complete
sense to me - probably because I barely understand how the sound
drivers work under linux.

I also had a bit of a problem with xmltv choking on internatioanl
characters.  I finally resorted to modifying XMLTV.pm to explicitly
request ISO-8859-1 when creating an XML parser.  Once again, I
suspect that this could also be fixed by configuring Linux to use
locales correctly.

Other than that, my other problems seem to have been fixed by 
upgrading to the latest CVS version.  I do still have a ground
loop between the computer and the Cable that it causing
some noise.  I've found various isolators, but I'd be interested
in hearing some first hand experience from somebody that has solved
this before.

I'd eventually like to add some functionality to time shift radio,
so if somebody is already working on this please let me know.

David