Mailing List Archive: Myth TV problems

Myth TV problems

Dec 2, 2002, 7:56 AM

Post #1 of 3 (1185 views)

I've been working on getting this working for a week now. And I'm fairly
certain I have it configured the way it needs to be. But something isn't
quite right...

I have 2 problems.

First is when I select Live TV to watch, it'll tune to the default channel
that I selected. But once I attempt to change the channel the screen
freezes. I have to kill mythfrontend to get to work again.

Second problem is I get an error about unable to open /dev/dsp when I start
to watch live tv. I'm guessing that my alsa driver doesn't support the full duplex ablity of my card. Any suggestions other than a new card?

I'm able to watch TV witout problems using xawtv, other than the color is
fairly washed out. But sound/video here work just fine.

I can also play wave files in KDE without any problems.

I've tried running all this as root with no success as well.

I'm running Mandrake 9.0 with an ATI TV Wonder Tuner. Sound card is a Sound
Blast AWE 64. The machine is a Athlon 950 with 192MB ram. It has a 30 GB
7200 RPM HD and I have verified that DMA is enabled with hdparm.

Thanks for any help.

Doug

Re: Myth TV problems [ In reply to ]

erik_nospam.arendse at bigfoot

Dec 2, 2002, 8:08 AM

Post #2 of 3 (1170 views)

Permalink

At 2-12-02 15:56, you wrote:
>But once I attempt to change the channel the screen
>freezes. I have to kill mythfrontend to get to work again.
99% sure it's the audio driver.

Unless you use the latest ALSA (rc6) don't complain... :-)

>Second problem is I get an error about unable to open /dev/dsp when I start
>to watch live tv.
Could be you use devfs, or any other reason why your sound does hot have a
/dev/dsp. First have a /dev/dsp working, that start mythtv.

>I'm guessing that my alsa driver doesn't support the full duplex ablity of
>my card. Any suggestions other than a new card?
See point 1...

>I'm able to watch TV witout problems using xawtv, other than the color is
>fairly washed out. But sound/video here work just fine.
>I can also play wave files in KDE without any problems.
Both don't use soundcard for full duplex, xawtv just mixes analog in to
analog out, and playing waves is only playing.
Mythtv must use be able to use the soundcard for both recording and paying
at the same time.

Erik

Re: Myth TV problems [ In reply to ]

maillists at sonictech

Dec 2, 2002, 8:45 AM

Post #3 of 3 (1163 views)

Permalink

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 09:56:02AM -0500, Doug Wiltanger wrote:
> I've been working on getting this working for a week now. And I'm fairly
> certain I have it configured the way it needs to be. But something isn't
> quite right...
>
> I have 2 problems.

IMHO these are probably just one problem... get the sound working and the
freeze will probably go away.

>
> First is when I select Live TV to watch, it'll tune to the default channel
> that I selected. But once I attempt to change the channel the screen
> freezes. I have to kill mythfrontend to get to work again.
>

> Second problem is I get an error about unable to open /dev/dsp when I
> start to watch live tv. I'm guessing that my alsa driver doesn't support
> the full duplex ablity of my card.

That would be my first guess, but maybe you could list the exact error,
particularly the bit that comes just after "unable to open /dev/dsp"? Also,
do you in fact HAVE a /dev/dsp? What are it's permissions?

> Any suggestions other than a new card?

<SNIP>

> I can also play wave files in KDE without any problems.

By default KDE (at least some versions) run a sound server called arts. You
can and probably should disable that for now since it takes over access of
the sound card.

> I'm running Mandrake 9.0 with an ATI TV Wonder Tuner. Sound card is a Sound
> Blast AWE 64.

I could be wrong but I think this card DOES support full duplex under Linux
so I don't think you'll have to replace it. Maybe you don't have the alsa pcm
modules loaded or maybe your system is using devfs. I havn't used devfs but
I think that would make your dsp device something like /dev/audio/dsp rather
than /dev/dsp.

--
Ray