For what it is worth, I finally got my setup working.  This is more of a 
blog type post of what I did to get my setup working.  Perhaps others 
trying to get their setup working will find it useful. 

Setup: Fedora Core 5, WinTV PVR-150, Intel Chipset motherboard 1GHz PIII

I just wanted to record shows off of TV.  No fancy home theater setup.  
No multiple tuners.  No DVB.

I followed Jarod Wilson's mythtv setup guide religiously 
(http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php).  My problems started when I got 
to the part about installing a capture card driver (ivtv). I got video 
initially, but I could not change channels.  I ran "yum update" to see 
if it would
help with the channel changing problem, and afterwards video didn't work 
at all.  To further confuse me, the ivtvctl program was missing the -p 
and -u parameters after the upgrade. I was off of Jarod's path 
completely at this point.  I later discovered the v4l-ctl program has 
some similar parameters to the ivtv-ctl program although I ever did 
figure out the equivalent v4l-ctl parameters. 

I read the troubleshooting guide at ivtvdriver.org, but my problem 
persisted after coldbooting.  I checked for conflicting module versions, 
but everything appeared where it should be. 

Next, I downloaded the fedora kernel development stuff, compiled the 
driver and installed it myself.  After a cold-boot, I was able to get 
video, but I was getting "i2c cannot write to register XX" errors after 
changing channels a couple times with a "cat /dev/video0" thrown in to 
test each channel change.  By the way, the mythtv-setup channel scanner 
is a good test of your ivtv setup.  No, I did not have a VIA motherboard.

Okay, back to basics.  I compiled the kernel myself and checked to make 
sure all the required configuration settings were set as per the 
how-to.  Next I did a "make distclean; make; make install" in my ivtv 
0.8.0 driver source directory and cold-booted again.  Same problem.  
Video worked, channel changing worked (via ivtv-tune), but eventually I 
got the pesty i2c errors.  I tried the ivtv svn trunk version, but it 
would not compile at all.

I checked my cpu load and noticed that I was running at a load of about 
2 to 3 while capturing video and a load of 1 with just misterhouse 
running.  I had a 1GHz processor, but I guess it wasn't enough and 
somehow the i2c commands were getting lost on their way to the card.

So...I purchased a new ECS RS-400 motherboard with a built-in ATI Radeon 
processor with s-video and rca output jacks, a 512 DDR2 RAM module, a 
2.6 GHz P4, and a 500 Watt ATX power supply.

After booting up the system, I had some "no eeprom" errors and 
discovered I hadn't seated my PVR150 card all the way!

I reseated the card and now I'm mythtv'ing away.

Bottom line: mythtv and video on linux is for advanced users only.  You 
may get lucky and get the atrpms software to work first time, but be 
prepared for a fight.

John Dillenburg


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