Some questions

[archived]

Hi all,

Hope someone might be able to get some direction on where to go next...

Setup my Pluto core with two PVR cards, a leadtek DVB-T card and an old Pixelview Playtv pro that I had lying around.

I installed a diskless MD which is out in the lounge and meant to be able to watch TV etv. (it has no PVR cards and is only going to be a frontend)

I have so far only concentrated on the DVB card. I ran mythtv-setup on the core (with X server running on my main PC) and configured the cards, sources and channels.
Then I ran (from orbiter) mythtv setup on the MD and made sure it pointed at the core Ip address etc.

After some time playing with drivers and XMLTV grabbers for Australia etc I now can do watch TV on the MD and get some sort of picture.

The problem is that the picture (and audio) stutters and jumps and is basically not watchable. The problem looks similar to watching a digital settop box with a poor aerial signal but I am not sure how to address that and if it is indeed the problem.

I am using rabbit ears aerial which usually is not a problem in my area as I am high up and have line of sight to the Sydney TV towers. I can usually watch TV without plugging an aerial in (ie: just using the connecting cable as an aerial).
Is there an easy way to tune this aerial? Like some application I can run (on the core) where I can see the signal strength whilst I move the aerial around.

Alternatively, I thought the problem might be related to the MD and its lack of CPU power. The machine is a socket 370 based system with about a 760MHZ Celeron in it and 512MB of memory. When watching (or trying to) TV on it CPU utilisation for mythfrontend varies from 50% to 99.9% so it is working hard. Is this likely to be a bottleneck causing the stuttering?
What can I do to address this? Is adding a seperate video card going to help (with the decoding). It currently uses the onboard video which is part of the intel chipset or something. Is this machine just not worthy?

Anyone, know which path to follow with this? Any similar setups that work fine?

Another question; when I originally was playing around with MythTV through pluto (a few releases of pluto ago) when I moved the mouse I got the orbiter menus popup to control it. That doesn't seem to happen anymore. Is this intended or a problem that I have?

And a completely seperate question; I put the old playtv pro in the machine as it has an anologue radio tuner on it and I would like to have this distributed by Pluto. Does this work? Would I still be using MythTv for this or one of the other apps? Anyone done it?

Thanks for any help

Darren

[archived]

Update on situation for future reference....

Played round with tzap a bit which gives a relative view of signal strength and sort of got my aerial into a position where its seemed best.
Didn't really make a lot of difference to the stuttering picture and audio.

Decided that CPU usage was too high so went and bought a Nvidia 5200 card - the cheapest they had and with a heatsink but no fan (which was desirable)
Put the card in and installed the drivers. Have not had a chance to do the xconfig stuff or anything like that, but a reboot of the MD and it seemed to at least give me video.
The result.... Stuttering gone and finally a watchable picture with audio. CPU usage hovers around 40% and I am sure that with a bit of time the video card can be configured a bit better.
HD is still a little bit stuttery but I will try and optimize the drivers etc before I worry about that.

Basically a good result and well worth the purchase. I am interested now in how low I can go on the CPU spec (mainly because I have even older machines sitting around - which will eventually become Audio MD, but wondering if they might actually be OK as video MDs with a new video card)

Next question... Does MythTV always take so long to change channels. I am currently doing it with the keyboard arrows, but it is painfully slow. Is this just normal or can something be done about it.

Also, whilst at work was browsing forums and reading about VDR as an alternative to MythTV and was thinking that it may be a better option for me (using a DVB-T card). Any opinions? It it more or less resource intensive?

Thanks
Darren

[archived]

i noticed that channel sources on mythtv setup is taking some time.
we have vdr support for dvb cards, you need to go to pluto-admin > devices > media directors and select 'vdr player'.

[archived]

i noticed that channel sources on mythtv setup is taking some time.
we have vdr support for dvb cards, you need to go to pluto-admin > devices > media directors and select 'vdr player'.

Can I have both installed? I guessed that they will both try and attach to the TV cards and be unhappy.

If I untick MythTV (and tick VDR) and then decide to change back later will it still have my config inside MythTV? Or alternatively do you know if there is an export/import facility in MythTV for configurations.

Thanks
Darren

[archived]

i noticed that channel sources on mythtv setup is taking some time.
we have vdr support for dvb cards, you need to go to pluto-admin > devices > media directors and select 'vdr player'.

Can I have both installed? I guessed that they will both try and attach to the TV cards and be unhappy.

If I untick MythTV (and tick VDR) and then decide to change back later will it still have my config inside MythTV? Or alternatively do you know if there is an export/import facility in MythTV for configurations.

Thanks
Darren

I've checked both, then unchecked VDR, but it seems that it stayed there giving messages about changing channels... I thin there is mantis bug already for this..

HTH,

Rob.