[mythtv-users] Mythtv 31 on a Zotac Ion

David Watkins watkinshome at gmail.com
Mon Aug 24 17:06:10 UTC 2020


On Fri, 14 Aug 2020 at 19:16, R. G. Newbury <newbury at mandamus.org> wrote:

> On 2020-08-14 7:47 a.m., Stephen Worthington wrote:
>
> > However, old Nvidia GPUs now have the problem that Nvidia is no longer
> > supporting the drivers for them.  When means that there may not be any
> > packaged drivers that will work, and even if you compile older drivers
> > yourself, you will need patches to make them work with the newer
> > kernels.  This is all a great shame, as the hardware is still fine for
> > the job, and until you need 4k you should be able to keep on usi
> > your old Nvidia hardware.
>
> Drivers in the 340 series are still being updated by NVIDIA (the 340.108
> driver (December 2019) patched the driver to fix a kernel change in
> 5.x??) here:
>
> https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide/
>
> Latest updates on July 9, 2020.
>
> Which includes really really good instructions on installation on Fedora
> 30 through 32.
>
> The drivers are available directly from:
> https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/drivers/
> And search for GeForce 9 on Linux64.
>
> Geoff
>
>
>
Well I got my Zotac Ion working over the weekend, just over a week after
the hard disk failure after more hours of effort than I care to admit.

I bought a new SSD, scrounged 4GB of RAM and have ended up running Fedora
32 and MythTV v32 (Master), which has a nice symmetry but is not what I was
aiming for!

To start with I installed lubuntu 20.04 with Myth31 and then lubuntu 18.04
with Myth 29, because I was having intermittent playback problems and had
read about big changes in the playback code for Myth 30 and 31 (certainly
the playback profile settings have changed a lot).  But that didn't really
make a lot of difference so I messed around with Motherboard BIOS settings
a bit to no avail before changing tack.

I reset my Motherboard to factory settings and installed Fedora FC32
following the instructions in Geoff Newbury's message above, including  the
patched-for-kernel-5.7' version of the 340.108 nvidia driver.

I installed Mythtv 31 from the Fedora Repo and immediately hit the MariaDB
bug! I tried replacing MariaDB with Community-MYSQL and trashed the
database into an unuseable state so reinstalled Fedora 32 again from
scratch.

This time I installed MySQL from the Community repo and built MythTV 31
from source.

This time I didn't get playback at all.  I got sound but a black screen
when playing recordings. I went through the playback settings until I was
sure they were correct and then trawled  the logs to find the
VDPCreateOutputSurface error that was causing the problems.

Googling didn't reveal anything helpful about that error and with nothing
much to lose I installed MythTV 'Master', just in case.  Master behaved the
same and I was at a bit of a dead end, at which I remembered that BIOS
reset.

It turned out that I now only had 64MB RAM assigned to the on board video
(despite 512MB disappearing from available RAM on boot up). I increased
that to 256MB and suddenly the room was full of light!

So after all that I can report that my Zotac Ion (ionitx-A-B) *can* still
work as a combined MythTVback and front end.

It's got 4MB RAM,  The OS and Database are on an SSD and I've got two
external 1TB drives.  Sound is from the motherboard stereo jack into a
stereo amplifier.

I'm using the VDPAU Normal playback profile without changes.  That's the
only preconfigured VDPAU profile in 31 and 32.  It's possible to set the
de-interlacer quality to low or high but I haven't touched that yet.

All I have to do now is get the shutdown and wakeup working and configure
my remote control.

Hope this helps someone and if anyone needs some more information please
let me know.

Take Care,

D
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