[mythtv-users] Opinion on Audio Troubles

[James Talmage]

I've followed the setup guide for the Fedora Core via Axel's rpms
maticulously, and I everything works, but audio is a bit wonkie (Audio is
sometimes choppy, always behind).  There are a number of places where I
could be going wrong.  What's most likely my problem?:

Choice 1:
  My motherboard, an Asus A7V8X-MX-SE.  It's got a VIA KM-400 chipset
(different than, but with a scarily similar title to, the problematic
KT-400).  DMA is enabled and hdparm returns a favorable diagnostic.  How
would I go about ruling out a DMA-bug and how would I fix it.

Choice 2:
  Video Card: the Integrated VIA-Unichrome output to VGA (I'm not even
trying TV-out options yet).  This one has me particularly suspicious because
the guide recommends overiding the default video drivers, but didn't give
directions for the VIA-Unichrome and I wasn't able to figure it out, so I'm
just running with the defaults. (If anybody has done this I'd appreciate a
detailed how-to).

Choice 3:
  Sound Output: I disabled the KDE soundserver, installed alsa, tried every
possible fader/muting combination known to man, etc. I'm using the onboard
AD1980 (which alsa detected and configured beautifully).

Choice 4:
  Hard Drive: Unlikely, but just thought I'd throw it in.  It's an ATA-100
that's only 30GB partitioned according to the guide with an XFS video
partition (I plan to upgrade the drive size once I get a satisfactory system
configuration).

More info:
  Encoder is a PVR-350 (currently for input only).  DMA is working.  I've
tried a number of resolutions and bitrates.

What would be your recomendations.  If new hardware is necessary I'd like to
keep purchases as small as possible, but I'm not opposed to doing what it
takes to make it work.  Also - is there a complete checklist anywhere for
ruling out any of these problems?

Thank you to all who have helped create and support MythTV - I'm very
impressed with it's rich feature set, and can't wait to get it fully
operational.

-James