The Blog of Harald

So I bought the “PVR-250”:http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr250_datasheet.htm (on sale at “Best Buy”:http://www.bestbuy.ca/” :-), and slapped it into my P933 to play. The install was easy, and the hardware looks nicely designed. But the software that comes with the card sucks. I don’t know how hardware guys manage so consistently to ship their products with truly crappy software. Simple stuff like you can’t tab between fields, if you set a record time before you change the date the time quietly resets itself (because you can’t record in the past, I guess), and so on. It’s very _pretty_ though; if they had put all that skinning effort into usability…

Anyway, that’s not important, since I also downloaded “KnoppMyth”:http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html in order to try out “MythTV”:http://www.mythtv.org/. I picked KnoppMyth figuring that I could find out if it worked and I liked the system, and then I could build from scratch if necessary later on. I’m glad I did; building a MythTV system from scratch is not for the faint of heart (and this from me, who likes tinkering with Linux :-).

First problem was getting the “TV-Out on my Matrox G400 to work properly”:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/2993#2993. After several tries with various different X drivers and configurations, I finally discovered the real problem: the KnoppMyth kernel comes with the vesafb framebuffer driver compiled in, so my Matrox G400 modules were never getting loaded. One kernel rebuild (and several hours) later, I had TV out.

The next problem was the network. My on-the-motherboard, Intel-based network interface (from the 82801 chipset?) kept “freezing”, with a timeout: “eth0: wait_for_cmd_done timeout!”. Lots of googling revealed that this is a known problem that apparently still hasn’t been fixed. Fortunately, There is an “Intel provided e100 driver”:http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Detail_Desc.asp?ProductID=61&DwnldID=2896 that supports this chipset, and _that_ one works. Download, build the module, and install.

Next was sound. After every reboot, the audio out would be muted, and I would have to login remotely and use alsamixer to manually unmute the Headphone audio out and then pump the volume up. Again, it turns out that this a known problem, and that the usual fix (alsactl save/alsactl restore) doesn’t work, because the ALSA software doesn’t save information about the Headphone output? Strange, but one again I found a workaround. Running

/usr/bin/amixer sset Headphone unmute 100

would unmute the Headphone output and set the volume to max; I stuck this in /etc/init.d/local so that it would run on every reboot.

Finally, the machine kept crashing with out-of-memory errors. I never did figure this one out, because I made two changes at the same time. I downloaded and installed the “latest ivtv drivers”:http://67.18.1.101/~ckennedy/ivtv/, and I also discovered that the MythTV cache file I had configured was larger than the cache filesystem (this would cause mmap() based access to fail with the aforementioned out of memory errors :-). I’m not sure which fixed the problem, but the box has been up and recording for a week now with no problems.

Now to figure out all of this transcoding stuff…

(Oh ya, and Richard Dean Anderson was very young when MacGyver was produced :-)