Re: [mythtv-users] HELP! I'm about ready to give up on MythTV!!!
On Wednesday 18 May 2005 21:45, Jeff Simpson wrote: not to start a flame war... Too late! but I suggest gentoo if you want to give it another go. Esp if you're technical, you should have no problems with a gentoo setup. It's more work to get started, but everything just WORKS. downgrading / upgrading / all possible, no more hassle with strange rpm dependencies, scouring the internet for the right rpm to install, dealing with packages not being available. I find statements like this highly amusing, thank you for the laugh. :-) -- Jarod Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Got a question? Read this first... http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html MythTV, Fedora Core ATrpms documentation: http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ MythTV Searchable Mailing List Archive http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/ pgpYzcni7C2pW.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] HELP! I'm about ready to give up on MythTV!!!
On Wednesday 18 May 2005 21:06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I used Jared's guide for FC3. But then I found out all sorts of little issues with FC3 that affected me... Like the fact that the ENTER key didn't work for MYTHSETUP (and the frontend too!) And a search of the list reveals that a control-enter gets around that. Or a downgrade of Qt. And the HDTV drivers didn't work on that version of the kernel, etc... Uh What? Gee, I should stop using that kernel with this... Oh wait, fully working HD3000... (and HD2000, and previously an Air2PC, which is now in xris's possesion). :-) I searched gossamer and found that the enter-key bug could be fixed by downgrading 'qt' -- But I couldn't downgrade 'qt' because of other dependencies... Such as? I believe there are all of 3 packages that one has to downgrade. I had no problems doing a downgrade at one point myself. I believe I've also posted to the list how to do it... So by now I was starting to get a bit peeved -- This was getting rediculous... I searched the gossamer threads and seemed to determine that FC3 was a bad choice for me -- more so because of the HDTV drivers than anything else. Again, I'm not sure what you're talking about, because I just set up a box for a friend with an HD3k, and it works just fine. So I started over AGAIN, this time with FC2. But now half the commands in the FC2 guide didn't work by doing a simple cut and paste (like they did a couple of months ago) because many of the packages referenced in the guide are not available anymore (obsolete versions?). Stuff changes rapidly, yes, likely obsoleted versions. Haven't updated the FC2 version in months (and won't ever). So I did my best to find the new versions of the packages and kept my fingers crossed that things would be OK in the end. Should be. Well, things looked like they were going fine, until I tried the test video capture on my PVR-x50 cards. All I get is a green screen and no audio. No matter which card I use, or if I use the perl tuner app or not... No such luck. Searching the gossamer myth threads, it appears that at least one message seemed to say that it was the xvid driver issue, while another claimed a V4L issue. But being pretty new to Linux, I haven't got a clue on how to do anything about it. (The messages did not specifically describe how to fix it, it just stated that it was an issue with xvid or v4l) You do exactly what it says to do in my doc: you take it to the ivtv list, with log output. btw: I am NOT a computer novice -- I'm highly technical... I'm the guy that everybody comes to with their computer issues (primarily Wintel), and I can usually have them back up running fine in minutes... But this stuff is really testing me!!! All I can say is that this isn't Windows... :-) So what should I do??? Can I un-install IVTV and/or lingering HD3000 drivers and try to re-install them, perhaps removing all the capture cards and only installing them one at a time? (IE: The PVR-350 first, then the PVR-250 and finally the HD3000) Or would it be better/easier to only have the 350 and 250 in the 'primary' backend server, then setup a 'slave' backend for the HDTV tuner? They can go wherever you want them. I've had that combination all in one box without a problem. (Actually, that combo and then some). I'm just getting so *bleeping* upset with this whole thing that I'm about ready to give up. I don't *want* to give up, but it seems like a hopeless cause right now... (and to add to the flustration, the 'evolution' email client I'm using has crashed at least 20 times while trying to type this message!!!) I prefer kmail myself. Its all fixable, no need to reformat anything. Stop by the irc channel, we can help you out there. For the ivtv stuff, get an email with problem description and log dumps to the ivtv mailing list. As for the HD3000, what exactly have you tried so far? Its honesly very easy to get working, once you know what to do. Its near the top of my todo list to finally add that info to my doc... I wish I could have about an hour of my time every day to do gratis support for users, in the form of simply shelling into their boxes to fix everything. Would be much simpler. :-) :-O AHHH!!! Ok, I fell a *little* bit better now, but not much... PLEASE HELP ME IF YOU CAN No yelling. I would *LOVE* to have MytyTV working with two of my Dish receivers connected to the S-Video inputs of the 350 and 250, and the HDTV tuner pulling in the over-the-air HDTV signals... That's my DREAM, anyways Perfectly possible... Kernel: 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 PC: Athlon XP 1800+ - 512MB Gfx: Nvidia GeForce 4 Disk: 100GB SCSI LVM (Video) 18GB SCSI (boot,root) 20GB IDE (swap,data) Tuner cards: PVR-350 PVR-250 PCHDTV3000 ...Though your cpu is a bit too light to be able to handle HDTV playback reliably yet. -- Jarod Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Got a
Re: [mythtv-users] HELP! I'm about ready to give up on MythTV!!!
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm just getting so *bleeping* upset with this whole thing that I'm about ready to give up. Jarod is the man. He will get you running on FCx if you read the instructions carefully and do your due dilligence on Gossamer. I'm more of a turn the key kinda guy, and for those like me I recommend KnoppMyth. It takes Debian Linux, MythTv, and all the dependencies and combines them into one pretty easy installation. Plus, there's a very active KnoppMyth community to help smooth out the rough spots. (Not to disrespect mailing lists, but there's even a KnoppMyth FORUM! ;-) Oh, and Jarod's right about the Athlon 1800 being underpowered to decode HDTV. You can receive HDTV broadcasts fine, but playing them will take more horsepower. http://mysettopbox.tv/ http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/ Yahoo! Mail Stay connected, organized, and protected. Take the tour: http://tour.mail.yahoo.com/mailtour.html ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] HELP! I'm about ready to give up on MythTV!!!
On 5/18/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip PLEASE HELP ME IF YOU CAN I would *LOVE* to have MytyTV working with two of my Dish receivers connected to the S-Video inputs of the 350 and 250, and the HDTV tuner pulling in the over-the-air HDTV signals... That's my DREAM, anyways Kernel: 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 PC: Athlon XP 1800+ - 512MB Gfx: Nvidia GeForce 4 Disk: 100GB SCSI LVM (Video) 18GB SCSI (boot,root) 20GB IDE (swap,data) Tuner cards: PVR-350 PVR-250 PCHDTV3000 Wow, that's alot of hardware to make play nice all at once! No wonder your frustrated. Why don't you start small? Say, get the 250 going with one DTV receiver, and all the channel changing overhead that's involved. When your happy with that use your new knowledge to get the 350 in the mix (I assume that you're not doing the TV-Out thing on the 350, since you list a Nvidia GF4 card above). This should be similar to the 250 setup. Now you should have a working box (with at least one tuner) to stand back and say Wow, it works. Once your happy with that, then try getting the HD3k working with your setup. I know that your dream is what your aiming for, hell if I tried to build my mythbox the way I wanted it when I started 1.5 years ago (lots and lots of disk and multiple backends/frontends), it still wouldn't be done. Just my $0.02... Josh ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] HELP! I'm about ready to give up on MythTV!!!
I'm just getting so *bleeping* upset with this whole thing that I'm about ready to give up. I don't *want* to give up, but it seems like a hopeless cause right now... (and to add to the flustration, the 'evolution' email client I'm using has crashed at least 20 times while trying to type this message!!!) Having spent way more time than I'd like to admit getting what has turned into a MythTV cluster let me share one more thing that often times gets missed. Hardware. Unless you're a hardcore game player, most people don't tax their hardware the way a myth front or backend will. Far more Disk IO, far more PCI bus IO (capture cards). You could have a machine that worked just fine as a windows box for the last 6 months, but crashes / locks / dies all the time under Linux / Mythtv. The fact you're having the email client crash, off a fresh install means you have bigger problems, which are only being amplified on myth. In my experience, start with the motherboard. I've had very good luck with both NForce and KT based motherboards. My current favorite is the MSI KT6V-LSR (found here : http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=KT6V-LSRclass=mb ) , which you can pick up for less than $50, and includes both SATA and PATA. It's what I'm running in my current master backend, which has (3) tuners, and 5 HD's in RAID5, and runs smooth as silk. I did go through 3 other motherboards (all older and had been used in other machines) before it got stable. Memory is another good place to look. Running an extended memory test for 24 hours clean can help eliminate that as a possibility. Stick with it bud.. there's a bump at the beginning, but it does smooth out. ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Re: [mythtv-users] HELP! I'm about ready to give up on MythTV!!!
I'm just getting so *bleeping* upset with this whole thing that I'm about ready to give up. Jarod is the man. He will get you running on FCx if you read the instructions carefully and do your due dilligence on Gossamer. Yeah, when I initially setup my test box with FC2 using his guide, I hit a few small hiccups, but things worked right off the bat. (With just a single PVR-350 tuner) I'm more of a "turn the key" kinda guy, and for those like me I recommend KnoppMyth. It takes Debian Linux, MythTv, and all the dependencies and combines them into one pretty easy installation. Plus, there's a very active KnoppMyth community to help smooth out the rough spots. (Not to "disrespect" mailing lists, but there's even a KnoppMyth FORUM! ;-) Oh, and Jarod's right about the Athlon 1800 being underpowered to decode HDTV. You can receive HDTV broadcasts fine, but playing them will take more horsepower. The cpu should be fine as I'm not going to beplaying back HDTV on this box -- It will be a backend only. Playback will only be on the frontends, and the ones that I want to play HDTV on will be built with good compents to handle HDTV playback. (The single frontend I have setup currently is only fast enough for SDTV (PIII 800), but I'll be building a couple of HDTV-capable frontends once I get Myth up running properly...) Maybe half of my problem is that I installed Linux with all of the capture cards already installed into the machine... And perhaps that made the setup/installation/configuration of the capture cards somewhat unpredictable... Should I have installed Linux without any capture cards, then introduce them one at a time or something? I guess that's more-or-less what I did the first time, havingonly the 350 on initial install, then later buying the 250. But when I tried to get the HD3000 working andthe drivers wouldn't compilewith the kernel... I'll have to boot up my machine and jump on the IRC channel that Jarod suggested to get things worked out... It'll probably be a 'quick fix' for somebody more Linux/Myth-literate than me... Jeff ---BeginMessage--- ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users ---End Message--- ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
[mythtv-users] HELP! I'm about ready to give up on MythTV!!!
Ok, after having spending just a few hours a couple of months ago setting up a Myth 'test' box running FC2, MythTV .16 and a single PVR-350, I was very excited about MythTV and it's awesome potential to replace my two Dish Network PVRs. So I bought a second tuner (a PVR-250) to start building a 'real' MythTV server. I installed it in my test server, and it worked like a charm, perfectly co-existing with the PVR-350. Then things sat for a while as other priorities took center-stage and my MythTV project was put aside for a couple of months. When Tax Return time came around, I had a little extra cash to spend, so I decided to buy a HDTV3000 card before the 'broadcast flag' law went into effect. (This was just a couple of days before it was overturned) So anyways, the card came in, and I decided to re-build my backend server from scratch to start with a clean install. (It was quite messed up from all the 'tinkering' I had done while learning Linux and how to setup and configure everything.) I used Jared's guide for FC3. But then I found out all sorts of little issues with FC3 that affected me... Like the fact that the ENTER key didn't work for MYTHSETUP (and the frontend too!) And the HDTV drivers didn't work on that version of the kernel, etc... I searched gossamer and found that the enter-key bug could be fixed by downgrading 'qt' -- But I couldn't downgrade 'qt' because of other dependencies... So by now I was starting to get a bit peeved -- This was getting rediculous... I searched the gossamer threads and seemed to determine that FC3 was a bad choice for me -- more so because of the HDTV drivers than anything else. So I started over AGAIN, this time with FC2. But now half the commands in the FC2 guide didn't work by doing a simple cut and paste (like they did a couple of months ago) because many of the packages referenced in the guide are not available anymore (obsolete versions?). So I did my best to find the new versions of the packages and kept my fingers crossed that things would be OK in the end. Well, things looked like they were going fine, until I tried the test video capture on my PVR-x50 cards. All I get is a green screen and no audio. No matter which card I use, or if I use the perl tuner app or not... No such luck. Searching the gossamer myth threads, it appears that at least one message seemed to say that it was the xvid driver issue, while another claimed a V4L issue. But being pretty new to Linux, I haven't got a clue on how to do anything about it. (The messages did not specifically describe how to fix it, it just stated that it was an issue with xvid or v4l) btw: I am NOT a computer novice -- I'm highly technical... I'm the guy that everybody comes to with their computer issues (primarily Wintel), and I can usually have them back up running fine in minutes... But this stuff is really testing me!!! So what should I do??? Can I un-install IVTV and/or lingering HD3000 drivers and try to re-install them, perhaps removing all the capture cards and only installing them one at a time? (IE: The PVR-350 first, then the PVR-250 and finally the HD3000) Or would it be better/easier to only have the 350 and 250 in the 'primary' backend server, then setup a 'slave' backend for the HDTV tuner? I'm just getting so *bleeping* upset with this whole thing that I'm about ready to give up. I don't *want* to give up, but it seems like a hopeless cause right now... (and to add to the flustration, the 'evolution' email client I'm using has crashed at least 20 times while trying to type this message!!!) :-O AHHH!!! Ok, I fell a *little* bit better now, but not much... PLEASE HELP ME IF YOU CAN I would *LOVE* to have MytyTV working with two of my Dish receivers connected to the S-Video inputs of the 350 and 250, and the HDTV tuner pulling in the over-the-air HDTV signals... That's my DREAM, anyways Kernel: 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 PC: Athlon XP 1800+ - 512MB Gfx: Nvidia GeForce 4 Disk: 100GB SCSI LVM (Video) 18GB SCSI (boot,root) 20GB IDE (swap,data) Tuner cards: PVR-350 PVR-250 PCHDTV3000 Jeff ___ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
