Hi, I'm in the process of setting up a PVR-250 to use MythTV. I've not used the application before today but I must say I'm very impressed so far. For the most part the info on the web to get things set up is pretty good. I've made it a long ways with a bit of help from Gentoo-Users. I have managed to record some video although so far I cannot view any of it. (Big problem, 'eh?) ;-) Anyway, this is my first post here and hopefully it will help me make some forward progress. Thanks in advance.
The PVR is installed and I am able to record video from the command line using the following set of commands: ivtvctl -u 0x3000 ivtvctl -p 4 ivtvctl -f width=720,height=480 ivtvctl -v input=3,output=1 cat /dev/video0 >test.mpg mplayer test.mpg The video and audio quality looks good when I do that. I haven't figured out channel tuning though. File size is small and the output does appear to be mpeg. mplayer is happy with the data. I have attempted to read through the guide here: (very good BTW) http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO.html#toc11 as well as use the Gentoo docs here: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Setup_MythTV but didn't find answers to the questions that follow: TODAY's GOAL: Record Saturday Night Live tonight. (About 10 hours from now.) ;-) 1) The system is using the PVR-250. I've set up a ZapIt account and I seem to be getting good cable guide info. Right programs, right channels, etc. 2) I've managed to record some video. It's currently going into a private partition called /TVstorage. However when I try to watch this recorded program MythTV first goes to a black screen and then pretty immediately comes back to the main screen. I see no video. 3) If I record for 10 minutes I see this in /TVstorage: [EMAIL PROTECTED] /TVstorage $ ls -aCs total 7435740 4 . 7435728 1009_20050423124000_20050423125000.nuv 0 nfslockfile.lock 4 .. 4 log [EMAIL PROTECTED] /TVstorage $ So 10 minutes of recording took up about 7.6GB. This seems to me that I'm getting raw video data and not the output of the PVR-250's mpeg encoder? Is this true? 4) If I am getting raw data how do I get the output of the encoder instead? This amount of disk space will kill me and if it was an mpeg file I could try watching it with other apps also. 5) Can this *.nuv file be converted to mpeg so that I can see if there's real video/audio there? 6) I'm seeing some messages I don't like in the log file: 2005-04-23 12:49:55.299 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write() 2005-04-23 12:49:56.801 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write() 2005-04-23 12:49:57.168 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write() 2005-04-23 12:49:58.303 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write() 2005-04-23 12:49:59.738 IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write() 2005-04-23 12:50:00.126 Finished recording first test (Manual Record) on channel: 1009 2005-04-23 12:50:00.280 Changing from RecordingOnly to None Two things concern me: 1) IOBOUND - blocking in ThreadedFileWriter::Write() - What's this message about. This is the only app I've seen do this so far. The machine is a fairly new 3GHz Intel ox, but CPU usage was low at 10% when recording. DMA on the hard drive is enabled and throughput is pretty fast according to hdparm: dragonfly ~ # hdparm -tT /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing cached reads: 2620 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1310.20 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 142 MB in 3.04 seconds = 46.75 MB/sec dragonfly ~ # 2) Did MythTV actually record in the correct channel? I was trying to record channel 9 (KQED tv) in the Bay Area from Comcast Cable. Does this message look correct? 2005-04-23 12:50:00.126 Finished recording first test (Manual Record) on channel: 1009 I'll stop there for now. Thanks in advance for any pointers you can give a new guy. Cheers, Mark _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
