> I'd argue that a more-correct analogy is, "We know how to design this > coffee maker so that it will turn off when the carafe is empty, and it > wouldn't cost any more to produce nor make the device less desireable > from the user's perspective, but we won't bother to implement it, > because you're not supposed to be leaving it unattended in the first > place---even by accident---and so it's your own damned fault." > > Let's please not punish the users. Please?
You're right -- I was a bit snotty in my original reply to this one. It is most certainly a bug, and a fairly serious one. But it is not a bug I've run into since I set up my partitions manually. I also should have explained from the beginning why I think that Watch Live TV is not the best way to watch live TV, as it were. > > At the time when the hardware got acquired, it wasn't clear to me that > the situation wrt MPEG-4 playback was stable---can you recommend any > particular MPEG-4 hardware decoders that work well with Myth? [...] > My big worry is stability and complexity---I see a lot of traffic > about nv versus nvidia drivers, the possibility of problems with > VIA-based motherboards (these are MSI K7N2 Delta-L's, which I > -believe- are VIA based, and at least 1.5 years old), and with > whether, e.g., commercial-suppression works well in the face of > transcoding, etc etc. [...] But if you're > confident (and if someone has good recommendations for) MPEG-4 capable > playback hardware, then it's an idea I will definitely consider. > [Other constraint---any card with an audible fan is out of the > running. I dunno if these cards typically have fans, but I know > that a lot of high-end video cards do.] It's not so much a matter of MPEG-2 vs MPEG-4 -- that's more of an issue for encoding, and as you've said you have MPEG-2 hardware cards (PVRs). The point is that the PVR 350 has an MPEG-2 decoder, meaning that it natively transcodes MPEG-2 to NTSC/PAL for TV-out without relying on the CPU. As someone else pointed out, this is only really necessary if you're really hard up for CPU cycles. The hardware you've quoted is more than adequate for the task, and you shouldn't need to use the 350's out. The drawback of the 350 is not its ability to send out a solid signal from an MPEG-2 source (which it reportedly does very well), but its ability to send out everything else from your X display to MPEG-4 encoded video to OpenGL visualizations in MythMusic, etc. An nvidia card solves this problem because it is able to send everything out of the S-vid port to a standard TV -- if you don't have an S-vid port on your TV (who does?), you can use an S-vid to RCA converter and/or pass it through an old VCR. This also means that you'll have to send the sound out though a different channel, but the onboard AC97 can handle it. Otherwise, or if you need surround and/or SPD/IF, there are good cards for $30 or less. You'll need to install the nvidia driver to get full support (particularly for Xvmc, but I have no experience with this). The current version is 7667, I believe. Fortunately, it is a unified driver so the same one works for pretty much all nvidia cards from gf2 mmx up. You do not need a new or top-shelf card to get this working. I've had it running without problem on a gf2 mmx, gf4 and fx5200. All of these come in heatsink versions -- in fact, I think the fx5200 is the only one that can also come with a fan. GF4s start around $40 new; I picked up an fx5200 heatsink model a few months ago for around $55. > By installing KnoppMyth, I was hoping to (a) sidestep a lot of that > complexity, and (b) have a large-enough critical mass of users who > were all running the same code that it was likely that a problem I saw > would have already been seen by someone else. This is the same rationale I originally used for trying KnoppMyth. I eventually got it running through sheer stubborness. Had I gone the Fedora- or other-distro-route first, I would have found KnoppMyth much easier to deal with. As it was -- and this was about 20 months ago -- trying to get KnoppMyth running was my first real experience with *nix since MS-DOS-based vt100 emulators for telnet, gopher, pine and whatnot back in the early/mid '90s. If I weren't so pig-headed I would have given up. I am very thankful I did not. Now that I get what KnoppMyth is and what it does, I can really appreciate what Cecil has put together. Still, I get a bit impatient when people come to this list with criticisms and complaints about a staggeringly complex application suite that is still in an alpha stage. It is refreshing to hear someone who is willing to track down and fix the bugs that they find. Since I am not a programmer, I can only offer workarounds. Best of luck. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
