[mythtv] Newby Questions For Digital Nova-T card and MythTV

George Styles mythtv at ripnet.co.uk
Tue Jul 27 05:28:01 EDT 2004


Hi,

Thanks for MythTV - great software, but as a newbe i have a couple of issues
that I would like comments on from the  experienced users.

Im using Mandrake 10 offical, with the CVS mythtv from last friday. I have a
WinTV Nova-T (digital terresteral) card, using the built in drivers in
kernal 2.6. I have a celeron 2.6 processor, and 512meg ram. I am up to date
with Mandrake updates (except perhaps kernel updates). I have no IR device.
The video card is a NVidia MX with the default Mandrake 10 offical drivers
(ie, i dont think i have the NVidia closed source drivers).

The card works perfectly using dvbstream | mplayer -

I created the channel list using dvb-scan and soft software i wrote (for
windows :( ) to covnert to a series of SQL statements to populate the
database. This worked great :)

Questions

1. On 'Watch Live TV' When it tunes to a channel which is not broadcasting
at the moment, the backend throws a fit. It keeps trying at 1/2 second
intervals to find a video stream, but fails. Eventually it gives up and
kicks you out of live tv. This is fine, except a) it causes a long delay
before you get control back and b) next time you want to watch live tv, it
defaults to this channel, and does the same thing again, so you have to use
mysql to correct the default channel.

Is it possible to make it time out quicker, and just display a blank screen
when there is no video stream, instead of bailing out?

2. When I try to record a program with just sound (in the UK we get the
radio stations broadcast on DVB-T) the backend segfaults. If i run it again,
before the scheduled recording has finished, it tries to carry on the
recording and segfaults again. I would love MythTV to support streams which
are audio only.

a) Is it possible to allow streams with no video (maybe just insert black
video data to make it a valid video file)?
b) Is there anything I can do to help debug the program? i am experienced
with Windows programming (delphi), but am fairly new to the gcc toolchain. I
understand a backtrace is helpful (i assume this is a call stack) - how does
one obtain a backtrace? do you just run the mythbackend through the gdb
debugger?

3. Wierd one - when I run mythtv as myself (user george) from bash, it works
fine, but when I run it from rc.local at boot-time (after inserting the
Nova-T modules), it seems to run OK but cant read video from the capture
card. I have tried running it as root and as me at boot time (sudo -u george
mythbackend). It is definately running as mythweb can talk to it, and ps
shows it.

4. When watching live tv on the frontend, is there any way to jump straight
to a channel? that way I could avoid channels I know are not broadcasting.
at the moment, the only method I know is to use up/down arrows to move
through them 1 at a time.

MythWeb is great though, it provides a neat and usable listing. and will be
my primary interface to MYthTV

Sorry this post is a little long, but i feel that I am 'so close' to having
a fantastic Linux DVR and if I could sort this little issues out, it would
be perfect.

Thanks

George



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