This program is fantastic! I've had it running for a couple of weeks now
and will be trying to expand it's capabilities with another tuner and
sound card shortly. Here are some of my observations:
My system is an Athlon XP2500 Barton (333 FSB) on an Albatron KT400-8X
mobo with 256 Viking DDR 2700 memory. Disks are a Fujitsu 7200rpm 20 gig
for the OS and programs drive and a WD 7200 rpm 80 gig for the data
drive. The capture board is a Leadtek WinTV XP Deluxe. Video is a PNY
card based on a Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 440 with 64 meg. Sound card is a
Creative SB Live based on EMU10K1 chip. RedHat 9 is the OS. KDE is the
environment.
1. The on-board sound is a Via VT8233 using the via82cxxx_audio driver.
It sucks. I can play music with XMMS and pre-recorded shows with MythTV
but cannot play live-TV. If I try to watch live TV I get a loud
motorboating sound, the screen freezes, and I have to remotely login to
the box and kill mythfrontend to shut it up and get control back. Also,
the Via sound won't work properly if the Arts Sound Server is enabled in
KDE. I spent many hours and finally disabled the on-board sound and
installed the SBLive (EMU10K1) card and everything works perfectly. The
sound quality is excellent. Kmix is used to control the sound card and
save the volume settings so upon reboot the sound comes back to the same
level.
2. I also spent many hours trying to get a SoundBlaster 128PCI (Ensoniq
1371) card working. I gave up. The system sees it and the drivers load
but no sound. It also comes up in Kmix as 'Unknown' while the EMU10K1 is
properly identified. No problem, put that one in the scrap pile!
3. In my opinion, the Nvidia drivers are the reason to choose an Nvidia
card. Even after building a custom kernel the driver installer does
everything necessary to enable the Nvidia card. The installation is
quick and easy, unlike many other things 'Linux'. I have the monitor
hooked to the VGA connector and a Mitsubishi projection TV on the SVideo
output and they both display the same image (driver set to "clone").
Setting the overscan to 0.7 fills the TV screen properly. I've tried
many different video settings and the best is 800x600 16bit depth.
4. I use mpeg4 encoding at 480x480 and 6000 bit rate. I can't see the
difference when set to anything higher. Maybe if I got a better TV I
would but this seems to be the best overall setting.
5. I installed MythTV on another one of my Linux boxes and it works
great. It's neat to change channels and watch TV thru the network. In
the instructions where it says to put in the IP address of the master
backend system use that systems hostname, not the actual numbers. I
found this out after an hour of trying to get the slave backend to
access the database on the master backend.
6. The remote control that comes with the Leadtek card works good after
getting the keys programmed. This particular remote has some duplicate
keys so I mapped all of them first, removed the duplicates, and
associated the remaining keys with the keyboard commands I wanted. It's
decent, but somewhere there has got to be a remote that I really like. I
just haven't found it yet. Maybe I'll just get a remote keyboard and
keep it by the couch.
This past weekend I added a Hauppauge WinTV GO board (hey, it was free)
to this system. The bttv driver auto-detected this card, unlike the
Leadtek card (I had to specify card=34, tuner=2 for the Leadtek card).
Now I just have to get a second sound card and I'll have PIP and
dual-recording capability. I'm going to stick with another EMU10K1 type
sound card. I hope the Linux EMU10K1 driver handles 2 sound cards
properly. Anyone know about this?
I also have to get MythVideo to work properly. It shows the movie files
but delivers only a black screen when trying to play a movie. I can play
the movies directly from MPlayer, but not from MPlayer-within-MythVideo.
I only have one copy of MPlayer (the latest) on the system and I've
changed the mythvideo-settings.txt file to point to the proper path but
still get the black screen. It's no big deal but it would be nice to
have only one interface to deal with.
Sorry for the rambling. Time to get back to work!
and will be trying to expand it's capabilities with another tuner and
sound card shortly. Here are some of my observations:
My system is an Athlon XP2500 Barton (333 FSB) on an Albatron KT400-8X
mobo with 256 Viking DDR 2700 memory. Disks are a Fujitsu 7200rpm 20 gig
for the OS and programs drive and a WD 7200 rpm 80 gig for the data
drive. The capture board is a Leadtek WinTV XP Deluxe. Video is a PNY
card based on a Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 440 with 64 meg. Sound card is a
Creative SB Live based on EMU10K1 chip. RedHat 9 is the OS. KDE is the
environment.
1. The on-board sound is a Via VT8233 using the via82cxxx_audio driver.
It sucks. I can play music with XMMS and pre-recorded shows with MythTV
but cannot play live-TV. If I try to watch live TV I get a loud
motorboating sound, the screen freezes, and I have to remotely login to
the box and kill mythfrontend to shut it up and get control back. Also,
the Via sound won't work properly if the Arts Sound Server is enabled in
KDE. I spent many hours and finally disabled the on-board sound and
installed the SBLive (EMU10K1) card and everything works perfectly. The
sound quality is excellent. Kmix is used to control the sound card and
save the volume settings so upon reboot the sound comes back to the same
level.
2. I also spent many hours trying to get a SoundBlaster 128PCI (Ensoniq
1371) card working. I gave up. The system sees it and the drivers load
but no sound. It also comes up in Kmix as 'Unknown' while the EMU10K1 is
properly identified. No problem, put that one in the scrap pile!
3. In my opinion, the Nvidia drivers are the reason to choose an Nvidia
card. Even after building a custom kernel the driver installer does
everything necessary to enable the Nvidia card. The installation is
quick and easy, unlike many other things 'Linux'. I have the monitor
hooked to the VGA connector and a Mitsubishi projection TV on the SVideo
output and they both display the same image (driver set to "clone").
Setting the overscan to 0.7 fills the TV screen properly. I've tried
many different video settings and the best is 800x600 16bit depth.
4. I use mpeg4 encoding at 480x480 and 6000 bit rate. I can't see the
difference when set to anything higher. Maybe if I got a better TV I
would but this seems to be the best overall setting.
5. I installed MythTV on another one of my Linux boxes and it works
great. It's neat to change channels and watch TV thru the network. In
the instructions where it says to put in the IP address of the master
backend system use that systems hostname, not the actual numbers. I
found this out after an hour of trying to get the slave backend to
access the database on the master backend.
6. The remote control that comes with the Leadtek card works good after
getting the keys programmed. This particular remote has some duplicate
keys so I mapped all of them first, removed the duplicates, and
associated the remaining keys with the keyboard commands I wanted. It's
decent, but somewhere there has got to be a remote that I really like. I
just haven't found it yet. Maybe I'll just get a remote keyboard and
keep it by the couch.
This past weekend I added a Hauppauge WinTV GO board (hey, it was free)
to this system. The bttv driver auto-detected this card, unlike the
Leadtek card (I had to specify card=34, tuner=2 for the Leadtek card).
Now I just have to get a second sound card and I'll have PIP and
dual-recording capability. I'm going to stick with another EMU10K1 type
sound card. I hope the Linux EMU10K1 driver handles 2 sound cards
properly. Anyone know about this?
I also have to get MythVideo to work properly. It shows the movie files
but delivers only a black screen when trying to play a movie. I can play
the movies directly from MPlayer, but not from MPlayer-within-MythVideo.
I only have one copy of MPlayer (the latest) on the system and I've
changed the mythvideo-settings.txt file to point to the proper path but
still get the black screen. It's no big deal but it would be nice to
have only one interface to deal with.
Sorry for the rambling. Time to get back to work!