[mythtv-users] Unable to initialize video

stephen mythmail at nb.sympatico.ca
Wed Mar 2 02:08:33 UTC 2005


Kirk Patton wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I upgraded my mythtv setup to 0.17 today, and now
> things are broken. :-(
> 
> I ran "mythfrontend -v all" and there appears to be an
> error.
> 
> 2005-02-22 11:24:08.384 Decoder not alive, and trying
> to play..
> 
> In the gui, I get the error "Unable to initialize
> video".
> This happens for both live tv and pre-recorded tv.
> 
> I was wondering if someone had any suggestion on how
> to identify the problem or correct it.
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> Kirk
> 
> Log files attached

Hi Kirk,

I had the same problem, and it ended up being a fairly simple fix (for me).

I had .17 working over the tv-out of a pvr350 for about a week, then I 
started getting "Unable to initialize video" errors every time I tried 
to watch livetv or a previous recording.  I saw the logs were 
complaining about permissions on the /dev/fb0 device, but they looked 
fine (the first couple of times I checked).  The weird thing was, I 
could still see the gui and watch videos and DVDs (with mplayer/xine), 
so I thought that permissions weren't the problem.  Turns out the 
/dev/fb0 device was a symlink to /dev/fb/0 which only allowed access to 
root, not the mythtv user.  Changing permissions on /dev/fb/0 fixed 
things for me.  (I'm running gentoo linux with a 2.6.10 kernel.)

Hope that helps,
Stephen



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