[mythtv-users] mythtv-setup with mouse cursor problems and blank screen

Robert Bradbury robert.bradbury at gmail.com
Sun Jul 22 21:51:56 UTC 2007


I have a Hauppauge PVR-150 that I've been trying to get to work with MythTV
for several weeks now.  This is on a Pentium 4 with an Intel 915 graphics
interface in combination with Gentoo Linux 2.6.20-gentoo-r8 (2.6.21 coming
soon).  Mythtv is 0.20.1.  All of the libraries are at the latest release
levels.

It took relatively little time to reconfigure UNIX and get video devices
that mplayer could read, so watching TV wasn't too bad.  A bit more was
required to get the Hauppauge IR controller working (as they seem to be
producing many models and there doesn't seem to be a "standard" Hauppauge
Linux IR configuration file available.

MythTV was a nightmare however.

a) It takes a long time for mythtv-setup to come up and it seems to use a
huge amount of memory (contrast this with say the Linux kernel configuration
utility...).  This seems to be one of the worst cases of "form" over
"functionality" I've ever encountered.

b) Connecting the Video Source to PVR-150-1 is a nightmare because it seems
to require the mouse to open a pull-down menu with options one selects
from.  On my system when you move the mouse cursor over the MythTV image the
mouse disappears!  I've done some searching and web comments range from the
fact that some older versions had problems displaying the mouse cursor to
some debate over people not getting the mouse cursor to disappear in full
screen mode (where one presumably wants it to go away).

Q1) Precisely *what* switch/config-file parameter/database-table entry needs
to be changed to control mouse cursor visibility?

c) After noticing the slow startup times, the large size, etc. I browsed
around in the setup program (or perhaps the frontend) and reconfigured the
display mode of the option/selection icons to use one of the lower CPU
overhead options (I think there were 3-4 options involving low/medium/large)
overhead.  A much better option would be a completely separate control
window (as is the case in GIMP) that one uses to control MythTV, then I
could move it to a separate workspace in Gnome if I wanted (i.e. one
workspace in full screen to watch TV while the rest in "work" mode).  I also
changed it to use OpenGL rather than QT (though I'm running an
xorg.conf*without* "glx" because in the
2.0.0/2.0.1 releases of xf86-video-i810 seem prone to generating
segmentation faults in the Xserver OpenGL functions when switching virtual
terminals (highly annoying that one...).  At any rate after making these
changes the MythTV window got really flakey.  If I was using the simple
theme and used right-arrow to move to the next menu option the previous
selection icon would disappear.  I'd have to go into some sub-menu and then
return to the main menu to get all of the icons back.  Many sub-menus would
display nothing but a blank (blue) background.  Needless to say its now
unusable.

Q2) How do I reset image/window related settings in MythTV to the installed
defaults (without deinstalling and reinstalling which suspect probably
involves having to reconfigure and reload all of the channels, channel
lineups, etc.)?

Q3) Is there a *simple* configuration utility?  If not, is there a
configuration file?   (I learned how to use vi 30+ years ago, I think I can
handle that.)

Or does MythTV foolishly store *everything* in MySQL? (not a very "light"
approach IMO)
If so I can handle some select/insert/modify statements if people can tell
me precisely which tables and rows I should be looking for to force the
graphics themes/icon overhead/QT/OpenGL options back into their original
state (I can even read source to determine specifics if pointed in the right
direction).

Q4) Can one delete most of the 13 MB of "themes" [1] without causing
problems or is there some database table or index file that requires their
existence?


Thanks in advance.


1. Ignoring the 65 MB of "extra" themes I could have installed...  Did the
mythtv developers work for a disk drive company?  If there are that many
visually oriented "theme" developers around, then I have a project known as
Nano at Home which could benefit from the extra time they seem to have on their
hands...
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