[mythtv-users] Video quality on 0.28 worse than it was on 0.21

Allen Edwards allen.p.edwards at gmail.com
Sun Aug 26 15:42:33 UTC 2018


We have success.  The box boots without issues and the playback is smooth.
I have both analog and digital sound.  Still to do is test the changes to
make the remote work but that is about it.  I wish to thank everyone and
particurally Stephen for the help in this very long thread.

Here is a summary of what I learned.

The background was that I had working hardware and just needed to put a
newer version of the OS and MythTv on it.  That took a large number of
hours.

The basic problem was that my 6200 graphics card used a 304 driver and
there was a bug in later Ubuntu versions which meant the driver would not
load. I had a 8600 card but it would not work with my Sony TV without
changing cables, which seemed very odd and made me concerned with getting
an even newer card.

Troubleshooting anything on Linux is made difficult by the many changes in
how Linux works.  For example, most of the Google found advice suggest
running commands that do not work because things either were no longer done
that way as of 14.04 or are done a different way now.  Some suggestions
broke parts of the system or at least left it in an unknown state, which is
part of the reason I was OK with doing a reinstall with 14.04.1.

The help on this reflector is priceless and I can't thank everyone enough.
It is a truly amazing community and everyone who contributes to it should
be congratulated.  I spent a lot of time getting and documenting how to get
digital to work back ten years ago and I fell I have now been paid back
several times over.  Thank you all.

It would seem reasonable to buy a more modern video card, or even a
complete new system, but there were two things that held me back from
that.  1) The risk of incompatibility with the TV given what I saw with the
8600 and my TV. 2) The lack of up to date documentation on the MythTV site
on which chipsets are supported specifically THIS
<https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU#Supported_Cards>page is almost two years
old and does not list newer cards. That put a level of risk in getting a
new card given that what I had worked fine with the old MythTV software.  I
was just about to go ahead and buy a 710 card when Stephen gave me the
answer which worked with my existing card, which I saw as lower risk.

My final advice to anyone using this thread to help them in the future is a
lesson I learned ten years ago. Once you get your MythTV system working,
never upgrade anything unless you have a very good reason to do so.  I had
ten years of trouble free use of my beloved MythTV until a hard drive
failure made me start over.

Thanks again. Hopefully I will not have any further reasons to post :-)
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