[mythtv-users] New to mythtv, need help

[Dewey Smolka]

On 1/23/06, Bill Baker <bill_chris at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I have a few questions about my setup, since I can't seem to get it to
> work properly:
>
> 1) Is it possible to make mythtv work without a soundcard?  What I would
> like to do is have all of the sound come out of the TV speakers.

If you want sound, you need a sound card. If you already have on-board
sound, that may work as well. My very first crack at Myth was on a
slower K6-2 than yours and the onboard sound worked, though the system
was not nearly up to the demands of MythTV. Unless you really know how
to get the most out of that 500MHz system, I'd recommend at the very
least a P3 700 instead.

If there's no onboard sound, look at Turtle Beach cards -- the Riviera
is $30 or less and works excellently with Linux.

Since you only have the RF input on the TV, sound and video will have
to be combined at some point before they reach the TV. I've never used
the PVR 350 output, so I have no idea how this works with that piece
of equipment.

If you don't get combined audio and video out of the 350s coax port,
then you could always use an old VCR as a composite (the
red-white-yellow RCAs) to RF converter. If the 350's got S-vid out,
use that instead of coaxial. S-video to RCA converters are a couple
bucks.

Alternately, if the nvidia card has S-vid out, use that with the
nvidia (not nv) driver.

> 2) When I choose "Watch TV", all I get is a black screen with the
> listing for the channel at the bottom.  Could this be related to the
> fact that I haven't put a soundcard in my machine?

No. This is most likely because your card is not set up correctly. If
you've got your antenna/cable in the RF-in port, you need to set your
tuner to tuner0.

Make sure you have your channel listing connected to your input source
-- tuner0.

You should always run mythfilldatabase after changing items in setup.
Don't delete your channel listings unless you intend to change them.

If this fails, make sure your card is properly recognized by
#lspci -v

I had a problem when rebuilding my system recently that my PVR 250 was
being recognized as either a 150 or a 350. If the card is improperly
recognized, this has been covered on the list.

> 3) I have successfully gotten the screen to display on my television
> set, but the viewing area runs off the TV screen.  I have tried messing
> with the xorg.conf file in order to make the whole screen viewable, but
> to no avail.  Is there something I can do fix this?

If you can go out the nvidia card through S-video to an RF modulator
for feeding the TV, I'd do it that way. The default 640x480 will do
fine, although you may find modelines that work better.

I used to use a gf2 like this, but be aware that (at least for me) the
TV picture was no good until X started.


>
> My specifications are below:
> 500 MHz AMD K-6 CPU
> 64 MB RAM
> 30 GB HDD

You are going to be bumping into all kinds of barriers with this
hardware. You may get a usable system out of it, you may not. Your
chances of getting this setup to function would be greatly improved
through more RAM -- at least 256.

> Hauppauge PVR-350
> nVidia GeForce 2 MX video card
> Fedora Core 4
> setup using steps at Fedora Myth(TV)ology -
> http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php
>
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