Thanks for the info John and I hope it is okay to respond with my reply on this mailing list.
I too had a some trouble setting up my system. When I was first fiddling with mythtv and linux I went with the first Redhat then Ubuntu. But after struggling and failing many times, I installed Gentoo. Honestly, I tried both Ubuntu and Redhat first because I didn't want to spend time compiling everything in the beginning. I've been using it on a home server for a couple of years so I kind of knew how it ran. The problem I found with using Ubuntu or Redhat stems from the fact that they compile everything they think you might need and don't really install what you really need. If you catch my drift. I'm not trying to discredit either distro, I just found that when I use Gentoo I know EXACTLY what is running and what isn't running. Yea, I had to spend extra time getting X.org working among other things. But the only real problem I ever had with Gentoo was a finding the firmware location when ivtv was modprobed. Investigating this problem I found that it wasn't really the kernel, the ivtv drivers or anything like it. I was using Jackass (gentoo), which is kind of a offshoot of Gentoo. After I switched back to vanilla Gentoo, everything was golden. I've been through a couple of OS upgrades on my mythtv box and it is still running like a champ. Yea, the compiling takes forever, but I usually set it install stuff overnight, when nothing is really running so it doesn't interfere with capturing video or my wife's Gilmore Girls. Basically, I've used Gentoo and will continue to use Gentoo, because I know what is running and why. Second, if I need to compile the ivtv driver or the ndiswrapper or whatever by hand then I have the tools to do so. Gcc comes standard on Gentoo, otherwise using Ubuntu or Redhat you have to apt-get the gcc compiler, hope it is the right one and pray that is compatable with the everything else on the OS. Third, well there really isn't a third, but just two makes it sound so short. Anyways, I didn't send this to say that Gentoo is better and start a distro war. I agree that using mythtv takes some time, but I think that anyone can get it working. It takes patience, time, lots of reading and researching, and a little bit of lovin'. Maybe I just got lucky and my hardware just worked, I don't know. Yet, I dislike the fact that I have to wait for rpm or debs to be compile for me and if they are I don't know how they were compiled or if they were compiled with the right compiler version etc. In the end you got it working and looks like you got a better system anyways. Maybe I should the excuse that linux didn't work on the current hardware and I need to get a bigger budget from my wife to get more toys, lol. Have fun with your box, Reid On 10/30/06, John Dillenburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > ivtv-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users > _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
