[mythtv-users] Re: Experiences and Impressions of MythTV

[Jarod C. Wilson]

On Sunday evening, Dan Marks wrote:

> The program is very cool but its one of the more difficult
> installs I've done of any free software package I've had.  This
> is mostly for two reasons I think:
>
> 1.  Because MythTV relies on a lot of packages (e.g. XMLTV, lame,
>     ALSA) as well as others I had to install (I have an nForce 1
>     motherboard and had to install the network, sound, and video
>     drivers for it) it took a while to sort out the instructions.
>     Plus RedHat 9.0's stock kernel doesn't seem to recompile correctly,
>     so I had to install a stock 2.4.21 kernel, which doesn't seem
>     to work with my USB mouse.  Ah well, I used PS/2 mouse instead.

Have you tried using any of the ATrpms kernels? ATrpms also has binary 
drivers for bt8x8 TV cards for the latest ATrpms kernels, so a kernel 
recompile wouldn't be necessary.

> The packages I used were:
>
> alsa-driver-0.9.5.tar.bz2
> alsa-lib-0.9.5.tar.bz2
> alsa-tools-0.9.5.tar.bz2
> alsa-utils-0.9.5.tar.bz2
> lame-3.93.1-fr2.i386.rpm
> lame-devel-3.93.1-0.n0i.i686.rpm
> NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0248.mdk90up_2.4.19_16.athlon.rpm   (video driver)

So wait... Are you using Mandrake or Red Hat?...

> NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0248.tar.gz                         (network driver)
> xmltv-0.5.14.tar.bz2
>
> 2.  The motherboard based video was intel8x0 based but the built-in
>     OSS driver with RedHat didn't seem to work very well with
>     mythbackend.  It would hang on opening /dev/dsp.   This seemed
>     to be fixed by installing ALSA.

So Red Hat it is...

> 3.  The BTTV driver seems to work very intermittently on my
>     motherboard.  The problem is that sometimes when I change
>     the channel occassionally I get VIDIOCSYNC errors from
>     mythbackend and I would have to unload and reload the "bttv"
>     backend before it will work again.

Is the compiled-for-Mandrake and kernel 2.4.19 driver supposed to work 
on Red Hat with kernel 2.4.21? It is possible is MOSTLY works, but not 
completely...

> Anyways, MythTV is truly a great program.

Yes.

> If I could figure out
> the flaky video driver, I would have no problems.  But this is likely
> not a MythTV problem.  Thanks!

I think you are correct. Sounds like driver issues... It might be worth 
your while to check out the ATrpms site:

http://atrpms.physik.fu-berlin.de/dist/rh9/

-jcw