[mythtv-users] tuner problems and some general questions

[Nick Tan]

Hi all,

I have an interesting problem happening with my mythtv setup.  I am 
using an old TV Tuner card with the bttv driver (its so old I can't 
remember what it is and it doesn't say on the card, but it works with 
bttv).  I have an external cable box which I will be controlling with 
lirc.  So in my mythtvsetup I set the thing to be tuned to a particular 
channel.  In the channel editor, I add this channel with the correct 
frequency, but make it non-visible.  Then I go ahead and add all the 
cable channels.

All is well, and I can watch TV fine - I just have to change channels 
on mythtv and the cable box at the moment until I have lirc setup 
properly.

But, after about a day, (and a reboot as I shut it down at night) 
mythtv seems to lose the tuner setting.  When I go to watch LiveTV, it 
comes up with a green screen with static at the top, with a static 
noise coming out of the speakers.

I use xawtv, tuned to the correct frequency and I get a picture, so I 
know its not the tuner hardware playing up.  The only way I can get 
mythtv to re-learn the tuning is to run mythtv setup, clear all 
settings and enter everything in again.  Then this will work for about 
a day again and I'm in the same boat.

I'm using 0.16 from the ATrpm repository on Fedora Core 2.  TV-out is 
via an nvidia Geforce FX5200 with the nvidia binary drivers.  CPU is a 
P4 Celeron 2.4Ghz.  Sound is via a SB-Live value card using the 
digital-out port.

Anyone have any ideas about this problem?


Now some general questions...

The picture quality of the live TV is pretty poor.  I think its the old 
capture  card, but it also could be the TV-out on the nvidia.  Does 
anyone else use the FX5200 TV-out (svideo) and have bad quality 
pictures?  By bad quality, I mean that the colours are washed-out and 
its not as sharp as it should be.  I'm considering getting a Hauppage 
PVR-250, which I'm thinking will improve the quality a fair bit, as its 
MPEG-2.

Is there a way to transcode a DVD rip to DIVX without having to rip the 
DVD again?  What I mean is, when in the DVD rip menu, there's the 
option of perfect quality (.vob file) or good quality (.avi file).  
Once I've ripped to a .vob, is there a way within myth to transcode to 
.avi?

Thanks for any help, and thanks to the developers for creating such a 
great system!

Nick