[mythtv-users] Feedback on first install

[hcp_public at prytz.net]

Hi, I just finished (well, you are never finished... ) my first myth box, 
and I have some comments and questions.

First of all, this is great! I looked at it about a year ago, and Mythtv is much 
better now, great job!

Oh, this is all from version 0.10 btw.

It basically just worked right away, no real problems getting things up and 
working in a basic fashion.

However I have some strange things I can't seem to find mentioned in the 
mailinglist or anywhere else.

Channel sorting: In the setup, you can set the order of the channels. What does 
this refer to? is it the channel id I set in the initial setup (eg 1, 2,3 and so 
on), or is it the channel id that refers to the frequency (eg. E8, S9 etc.)?
It seems to be the latter one, which means the channels are in an non-intuitive 
order. Is there a way to order the channels byt the channel id?

The second thing is probably related to the one above. According to the docs, it 
should be possible to just enter the channel number, and myth should jump to 
that channel. When I try to enter a channel id (4 for example) the number 4 will 
be shown in the top left part of the screen for a couple of seconds, and the 
disappears. Shouldn't the channel chenge to channel id 4? Ort should I enter E8, 
which is really the frequency?

I also have som trouble with the automatic scheduling of recordings (you know, 
record this show whenever it is shown). The program listing here in Norway lists 
show titles and episode numbers. This is taken a as a part of the program name 
byt mythtv (or rather tv_grab_sn i guess). This resuls in the title being f.eks. 
"Star Trek: Voyager (23:26)" (or whatever). the next episode will then be "Star 
Trek: Voyager (24:26)" which means that myth is unable to recognise this as the 
same show. 
Is there anye existing way around this? I could hack tv_grab_ to ignore the 
episode numbers, but there might be som other solution already.

This probably dosesn't belong here, but is anyone else using the Terratc cards 
with the saa7134 driver? I'm having some trouble with this card. The sound seems 
to disappear sometimes. If I go to watch tv, the sound is gone, and changing 
channels doe snot help, howevere, if I exit Live-tv mode and re-enter, the sound 
comes back, but very low. If I exit and enter live-tv again, the sound is 
present, and at the normal level.
This does not happen everytime, but rather often. It also happens when myth 
attempts to use that card for a recording (ie., no sound). This card also seems 
to produce a variation in the brightness of the image. It sometime varies up and 
down in short "bursts". 
I imagine that much of this is a driver problem, but if anyone has any clues, 
please tell ;-)
(the driver is version 0.2.7, I couldn't get the 0.2.9 version to compile. I 
complained about "unknown field `owner' specified in initializer" and if I 
commented out the relevant line in saa7134-i2c.c, I couldn't contact the card at 
all.)


The last thing is really about specking a computer. Currently I'm running on a 
XP1800+ and it's anlmost capable of recoring one stream while watching live-tv, 
but not quite. Would increasing the filesizse used by the mpeg coder result in a 
lower cpu usage? (ie. The default is 2200kbps, ikf I increas it to say 4400kbs, 
is the work done by the cpu lowered?)
Would a, say, athlon 2400+ be able to do record+livetv in 640x480?


Any feedback would be appreciated.

Hans-Christian

-- 
Hans-Christian Prytz
hp at obiwan.prytz.net