MythTV questions

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Saturday 25 November 2006 01:45 pm, James R. Van Zandt wrote:
> 1. Channel up/down keyboard commands.  When I first started watching
> TV on the monitor, cursor up or down would change the channel and a
> blue overlay would pop up with the new channel number and a thumbnail
> description.  Now, the overlay comes up but has only the current time
> - no channel number and no description.

This sounds more like a problem with the source being linked to the listings.  
Perhaps going into the mythtv-setup, you can find out what is wrong here?  I 
haven't see this one, so I can't say for sure what caused it.


> 2. Output to a regular TV.  The PVR-500 doesn't have any video output.
> However, the AOpen motherboard has four kinds of video output: D-sub,
> DVI, YPbPr, and S-Video.  I have my LCD monitor connected to the DVI
> jack.  My TV accepts S-Video, but that jack seems to have no signal.

I don't have any experience with TV output persay since I have a 32" and a 36" 
computer monitor for my setup.  That said, I can tell you that you're on the 
right track looking at the XF86 configuration files.  If you can figure out 
the options for your video driver to get it to output to different ports, 
then Myth should just comply with whatever output resolution/port X is using.  
The exact details will have to do with the exactl driver you should be using, 
which is almost surely not going to be the vesa driver.  Since you mentioned 
nvidia, I'm assuming the nv or nvidia binary drivers will have the options 
you're looking for, but this isn't a Myth-specific question, so help should 
be abundant out there.  You also mentioned an Intel driver.  Those can be a 
bit of a pain with odd resolutions if they are 945 or 915 or 815, etc based 
cards, but a utility called 915resolution should be able to help with that.

The last time I setup a TV to receive VGA signals, I do recall it was a bit of 
a pain to get resolutions right, but I don't know if things have changed 
since then.  It's been awhile.

> (Maybe I should get a PVR-350 card, which has a hardware decoder.)

Nah... sounds like you've got enough power - no need to spend more just to get 
output going.

> 3. Noisy picture.  The TV picture on the LCD monitor is pretty poor -
> much noiser than on a TV directly connected to the cable.  There's a
> sample of a few seconds at http://jrv.oddones.org/sample10.mpg,
> captured with "cat /dev/video1 >sample10.mpg".

It does look pretty grainy.  Is that all channels or just specific ones?  If 
it's just specific ones, you may need to finetune the channel frequencies 
which is most easily done from accessing the channels database and adjusting 
values for ftune (I think) between -20 and 20 or so.  I've had to do that on 
a few channels (Tyngsboro Comcast) to get them to come in clear, but it was 
obviously just a few channels coming in unclear.

> Maybe my CPU isn't fast enough to support software decoding?  Here is
> the kernel's report on the processor:
>   model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz

It's not that.  It's faster than mine anyway...

> "top" reports that mythfrontend is using 92% of the time during
> playback.  (I guess that's another argument for getting a PVR-350.)

You mentioned you were using the vesa driver - that's a big draw on processor 
resources because it's like working without a graphics accelerator at all.  I 
think you'll find that processor usage just to show video in X will drop 
drastically just by using a real X driver.

> 4. Playback command setup.  I eventually found by navigating
> mythfrontend | utilities/setup | Setup | Media Settings | Video
> Settings | Player Settings there was a default display command
> "mplayer -quiet -fs -zoom -vo xv %s".  However, removing "-fs -zoom"
> didn't change anything.  The help for that field is "This is the
> command used for any file that [sic] the extension is not explicitly
> defined".  Where are other commands "explicitly defined"?

There's a setup or config section of the Myth menus where you can go into the 
settings for the Video section.  This doesn't relate to watching TV, but 
videos that you've saved in /myth/video or that you've ripped from DVDs or 
something.  Anyway, you can setup for example, a different command that will 
open a .rm file using realplayer or a flash file using flashplayer or 
something.


Anyway, I hope you found something helpful in all this replying...
-N