[mythtv-users] giving up on 0.21

[Rich West]

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Paul Bender wrote:
> Greg Woods wrote:
>   
>> I have been trying for a couple of months now to get the 0.21 Myth
>> packages from ATrpms to work well on my Fedora 8 system. I am at a dead
>> end. If I remove all the myth* packages, and try compiling from my old
>> 0.20 SVN source, is there a chance this could actually work? This
>> version did work well under FC5 on the same hardware, so I do not
>> believe my problem is lack of hardware power. It has to be software
>> configuration, but I have tried everything I can think of. I  have tried
>> every playback profile from CPU-- to CPU++, and I still get "NVP:
>> prebuffering pause" filling my logs, and choppy or bad looking HD
>> playback. I also cannot get Myth to work with ALSA; the only way I can
>> get any audio at all is to use /dev/dsp (OSS). I've been told this is a
>> Pulseaudio problem, but I can't figure out how to make it work, and
>> removing the pulseaudio stuff from the alsa.conf file doesn't help
>> anyway. (The OSS audio works well enough, but I'll need ALSA eventually
>> when I move to optical sound output). I have also tried both 96 and 169
>> versions of the Nvidia driver (GeForce 5500); the 96 versions don't work
>> at all on this system, and it doesn't matter which subversion of the 169
>> driver I use, I still get crappy playback.
>>
>> The closest I came to acceptable was the CPU-- profile, and that looks
>> OK for shows like "ER", but looks terrible for anything with fast motion
>> (like hockey). Even with "ER", I get prebuffering pauses when I first
>> start playback with crackly audio for a few seconds, then it settles
>> down and looks OK even though the prebuffering pause messages continue
>> in the log. Attached is a log sample, just in case it makes light bulbs
>> come on for anybody still reading this.
>>
>> My next plan, when I feel a little less discouraged than  do right now,
>> is to try the 0.20 SVN sources. I feel like I have nothing to lose.
>>
>> --Greg
>>     
>
> I am sorry that you are having such difficulty. Were it my choice, 
> rather than giving up on MythTV 0.21, I would give up on Fedora Core 8.
>
> I have been using Red Hat based distributions for over 10 years. 
> However, as of RHEL 5.0, I stopped using the "community versions" of Red 
> Hat for my servers and for MythTV. The community versions too often and 
> the features in RHEL 5.0 are sufficiently complete.
>
> At this time, I am running CentOS 5.1 for my servers and MythTV backend. 
> I switched from Fedora Core 6 to CentOS 5.0 (clean install) and could 
> not be happier. I have found MythTV to be much more stable under CentOS 
> 5.0 (now 5.1) than under any version of Fedora Core. While the backend 
> crashed intermittently on Fedora Core 6, it has NEVER crashed on CentOS 
> 5.x. In addition, CentOS 5.x does not have the rather new and unreliable 
> PulseAudio support included in newer versions of Fedora.
>
> The change in how MythTV configures rendering(i.e. playback groups) 
> between 0.20 and 0.21 took some getting used to. For me, the added 
> flexibility was not worth the disruption. However, once I created my own 
> playback profile for 0.21 that matched what I was doing in 0.20, the 
> frontend performance and reliability of 0.21 matched that of 0.20. 
> However, since I use MiniMyth rather than CentOS for my frontends, I 
> cannot say whether or not you will have the same experience with CentOS 5.x
>
> I continue to use Fedora on my desktop machines. However, for machines 
> that need to be more predictable or risk suffering severe drops is WAF 
> and CAF (child acceptance factor), I have switched to CentOS 5.x. My 
> experience is that CentOS 5.x is more stable and it does not require as 
> frequent upgrades.

I have to agree.. the problems you are experiencing are not really 
related to MythTV entirely, but to the underlying operating system.  
Fedora 8 can be made to work, but it can also be a pain doing it.  While 
I would rather be running CentOS on my backend and frontend servers for 
the stability and to escape the viscious 'upgrade cycle', I've been 
running them under Fedora since the start.  Fedora, as would be 
expected, tends to be more bleeding edge, and, well, with that sharper 
edge, you can get cut..

I've got F8 running on my backend (finally stable again) and on one 
frontend.  The other two front ends, although running Fedora 8, are not 
stable and I am just going to rebuild them (I'm nearing a netboot setup 
since these are so vanilla) from scratch (or just clone the working 
system).  The point is: you can get it running under Fedora 8, but you 
need to invest some time.

Oh, and I don't know of the video card is holding you back, either.. I'm 
not sure how well that card handles HD.  My 6200's just barely handle it 
with Xvmc..

-Rich