[mythtv-users] time to start over, looking for ideas

[Jason Richardson]

ok, i have been bashing my head on this for well over a week now, and
have gotten nowhere.
For historical reasons, heres my setup and whats wrong:
Athlon (Slot A) CPU at 850 MHz
Cheapo Jetway (i think) motherboard with via chipset of some sort (82cxx?)
384 MB sdram
Cheap agp sis video card
2 NICs (ne2k-pci, 8139too)
WinTV PVR-350
bt8x8 of some sort
SBLive sound card

the sis video card was purchased to have a better supported tv-out than
the voodoo3 3500 that was in the machine previously, though i now intend
to run everything off the pvr-350.
ater screwing with the onboard audio and having various issues with it, i
stuck a spare sblive in the machine. no sound issues now, but to
simplify the hardware i may try to utilize the onboard sound again in
the future.
I also doubt i will ever use the bt8x8 card again now that i have the
pvr-350 and i have no need to record more than one source at a time, so
it can go away if it is determined to be causing problems at any point.
For software, the machine has a fresh install of Gentoo 1.4 using the
gentoo-sources 2.4.22 kernel. I am using cvs mythtv and cvs ivtv, as I
was under the impression that cvs source was required to use the pvr-350.

The setup has not worked from the start, giving anything from garbled
video to completely failure to work to hard lockups. I have managed to
get stable framebuffer output, and can save from the encoder for a few
minutes at a time (it just stops saving data at some random time 2-4
minutes into the recording). at no time have i ever gotten anything to
display when trying to use the hardware decoder.
Now then, I am not necessarily asking for fixes, I am mostly curious if
using cvs was a bad idea, and if so exactly what versions of myth and
ivtv i should be using.
As stated above, it is my intention to use the pvr-350 as an all-in-one
vivo solution similar to a tivo.
any suggestions would be appreciated :)

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