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.<br><br>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.
<br><br>MythTV was a nightmare however.<br><br>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.
<br><br>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).
<br><br>Q1) Precisely *what* switch/config-file parameter/database-table entry needs to be changed to control mouse cursor visibility?<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.)?
<br><br>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.)<br><br>Or does MythTV foolishly store *everything* in MySQL? (not a very "light" approach IMO)
<br>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).
<br><br>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?<br>
<br><br>Thanks in advance.<br><br><br>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@Home which could benefit from the extra time they seem to have on their hands...<br>