[mythtv-users] MythTV on a Via Epia M10000, how?

[Anthony Fremont]

Christoffer Kjølbæk wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I saw MythTV some month ago, and wanted to make a box with MythTV.
>> Therefore I bought a Via M10000 board, and have now for a month,
>> tried to make it work.

Don't give up yet, you're probably getting close.  ;-)  It's a pain, but
you'll eventually get it to work.  Unfortunately it's been about 8 months
since I last delved into the Epia stuff so I've forgotten many of the finer
details.  I recall that you really have to get all the pieces in place to
make it work, but it is do-able.  The wiki is pretty nice now so it should
cover everything you need.  I remember that last year I had to use the wiki
and a couple of other howto's to figure it all out.

As luck would have it, I am just now getting back into things with my tiny
Epia M10000 board (it's going to be my new baby daughter's personal CES
(crib entertainment/educational system ;-)).  I just upgraded my kernel to
2.6 and am now getting ready to do the libddmpeg-1.6 upgrade, so that should
be loads of fun.  It works pretty well right now, but I want to refresh my
memory on all this so I'm gonna upgrade it all.  I might even switch to Xorg
to really make things exciting.  ;-)  I'll try to keep the list advised of
my progress.

Gentoo was nice because I could download a couple of 'ebuild' files and
spare myself from having to patch a stock kernel and X.  I even found an
ebuild file online for libddmpeg as well.  This made the installation of the
pre-patched kernel and X server a piece of cake.  I even tried out the VIA
closed source stuff and Ivor's open source support.  I believe that I am
using Ivor's stuff right now.

>> I have followed the howto at epiaewiki, but can't get the graphics to
>> work. Then I have tried a guide with Fedora, but get kernel panic all
>> the time.

Hmm, I use Gentoo so I probably can't help you too much with Redhat.  What
precisely do you mean when you say you "can't get the graphics to work"?
BTW, make sure you only load only one of the following three modules at any
given time:

via_v4l_drv (mpeg hooks)  <----this is probably the one you want
viafb            (frame buffer and directfb hooks)
cle266vgaio (directfb hooks)

They reportedly don't play nicely together.

Hint: I also don't use framebuffers in the kernel, so that eliminated some
of the confusion for me as well.  If you're using framebuffer support, my
advice is turn it off on the kernel and X configuration.

>> Right now, I am ready to brake my motherboard in pieces, and give up.
>> But before I do this, I would like to now, if anyone outthere has
>> got it working on a Via Epia M10000 card?

Keep trying and use the wiki at www.epiawiki.org  I can watch pre-recorded
TV shows (from my master backend system) recorded like this:

  Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg2video, 480x480, 29.97 fps
  Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, 384 kb/s

using only about 30% of the CPU.  Everything plays back beautifully
including the OSD fadeouts.  This includes de-interlacing the stream as
well.  DVD playbacks utilize about 40% or so of the CPU using mplayer or
xine outside of Myth since I haven't added the DVD support to Myth yet
because I just installed the DVD drive in it.  Rest assured that the EPIA
hardware is fully capable of making this work (heck I even got this stuff
all working on a 600MHZ Epia earlier on so most of my Linux installation was
compiled without SSE instruction support or C3 optimizations).  The key is
having the right kernel modules, X drivers and matching libraries.  If any
single piece is missing, it won't work.  This means you have to patch and
re-compile X as well as the kernel.

Good luck and don't give up