I beg to differ!!

I've just installed from the latest KnoppMyth ISO.
My hardware is as follows:

Shuttle Motherboard with VIA chipset.
Celeron 1.2Ghz
Leadtek A180 GeForce 4 MX440 64MB AGP8X - VIVO

The installation proceeded o.k. and I have run the install-nvidia.sh script.
(When X boots up I now get the Nvidia spash screen)

Two problems:

A) I have the video display outputting to a TV (as an external monitor) successfully....however.. as soon as the splash screen apears I only get black and whiite....the BIOS/POST and the Linux bootup display in colour however.

B) When I try to view live TV I get a blank screen. (BTW, what's the keystroke to jump out of watching live TV!!??).

I notice when the system boots up that it doesn't find any Multimedia video cards. I have tried installing the nvtv package but still no deal.

Is there anything I have to configure in the kernel to activate this?

Note.. I don't have or need a tuner attached as I am getting the video directly from my cable-tv box. I only need to record whatever vidoe is coming in.

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I find all these problems a bit bizarre given the apparent ease other people have getting MX440s running.

BTW, the card works beautifully under windows with the software that it came with.. PiP.. the whole deal...

Any assistance would be greatefully appreciated... I've trolled these forums for a long time and had no luck. I'm at the point of just buying a tuner card that I know will work and writing off this GeForce card.

Cheers,
TS.

ok what people mean when they say nvidia works great is tv out and 3d accel and stuff like that. The personal cenima or vivo or anything that is supposed to tune tv (or capture video) is not supported by default in knoppmyth. Not to say that you couldn't get it to work, I think there are some drivers out there somewhere for these cards, but I believe they are very new and experimental.

If that's the case, is there anyone else out there with an MX440 that has had this black-and-white image problem.

These drivers seem to be very elusive!! (Google is NOT my friend.)

Failing this can anyone suggest a reasonable quality tuner card.. for the sake of getting it working I am willing to buy a tuner card even though I will not be using the tuning functions. I eventually plan to get this in a Shuttle box, so a small(ish) PCI/AGP card would be preferable.

Cheers,
TS.

CTR-ALT-F1 to get out of live TV & to a shell command prompt. I may be mistaken, but I've found that usually blank-screen TV out out for nVidia is one of two things, or both (Assuming that the nVidia drivers are correctly installed):

No sound enabled (or sound muted), or you have the wrong video_out selected. To check sound, after CTR-ALT-F1 and login, is to run Alsamixer (usr/bin/alsamixer). Make sure sound is un-muted.

For video, again at command prompt, type: test_ioctl -p 8
This seems to work for most nVidia cards if you are using SVideo. If that doesn't work, replace the '8' with '0', CTR-ALT-F7 back to live TV to check. Keep repeating this process from '0' back up to '8' to see what gives you the best picture (or any picture in your case).

You can also manually run 'mythfilldatabase' to be sure that channel info is loaded. If the above doesn't help, then you are beyond my VERY limited Linux powers

_________________
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
- Walter Lippmann

Thanks for that. At this stage I am not too concerned about sound. I just want to prove that I can get the TV out working. As I am using a VIVO video card and not a true tv-tuner, my sound will be coming from line in socket of the sound card (connected to the audio out of my cable TV set top box).

As I am able to get the mp3 player of Myth playing songs, I assumed that sound would be o.k. Do I in fact need to do something else with the sounds before the TV out will show up??

As for the test_ioctl -p 8, it doesn't find /dev/video0 (as I get the no "Multimedia Video cards detected" message on startup)
That was one of the questions I raised in my original post. Where do I get the actual drivers for the TV in/out function. The NVIDIA drivers work as far as X is concerned but I am sure the is another driver needed (and perhaps the enabling other options in the kernel) before I can get TV out functioning.

Cheers,
TS.

testioctl stuff is only for ivtv (pvr250/350/m179/etc) I think the whole problem here is that you do not have a video0/1/etc. Basically you do not have a video input source, therefore it cannot record the tv and cannot play it back. The nvidia 440's work just fine for video out to tv, but they do not that I know of support video in of any sort. The only nvidia cards I know of that support video in is the Personal Cinema cards Which you can find a link to the drivers from this forum.

here is the tread that points to some kind of drivers, although I've not researched it and don't know if we're talking about the same things.

This one definitely supports it.. like I said, the VIVO software for Windows works perfectly.

I think I might just bite the bullet anyway and get a Nebula DigiTV PCI card instead. Has anybody here had any experiences (good or bad) with this tuner card?

I ordered the Nebula DigiTV PCI card yesterday.
I should receive it on Monday.
Well let you know how it goes.

In the mean time I am still trying to get colour output to the TV with my MX440. Any ideas?

For those that haven't read the previos posts, this card outputs to the TV (in colour) perfectly using the (windows) software that came with the card.

Thanks.
TS.

I used the example file /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.nvidia-tvout.sample.

When I first started X everything was in black and white ont he tv screen. I read some where that this was due to the S-Video to RCA converter. If you edit your XF86Config-4 file and look for the Monitor Settings:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
Option "DPMS" "true"
Option "TVStandard" "NTSC-M"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "TVOut"
Option "TVOutFormat" "SVIDEO"

Make a change in the line Option "TVOutFormat" "SVIDEO"
change "SVIDEO" to "COMPOSITE"

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
Option "DPMS" "true"
Option "TVStandard" "NTSC-M"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "TVOut"
Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE"

That should fix the black and white problem on the MX400, which is the card I have too. Hope this helps.

Thanks for that turkish. I'll have a bit of a play with it. (I am in Australia so I'll try setting it to PAL).

Just out of interest, I did some tinkering with the card in windows. If you set the windows software card to use SECAM, I get black-and-white output too.

Perahaps it is defaulting to SECAM. Kind of strange though. as it only does it when X loads. The BIOS and standard console comes out it the correct colors.

Cheers,
TS.

Changing it to COMPOSITE should fix the problem, I had that problem at first with my MX 440, and I read a post that when you use the SVIDEO to RCA converter only black and white is sent. I don't remember exactly the explination, I'll see if I can find a link for the post for the explination.

yes the converter is why you had to specify composite. svideo seperates b/w and color where composite puts everything together.

here is the link for where i got that.
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... =composite

I tried adjusting the TVStandard and TVOutformat options to PAL and COMPOSITE respectively.

Turns out it was a setting on the TV!!
It has an switch for the signal type. Either PAL or AUTO.
I switched it to AUTO and YAY!!! I get colour!!!
What a relief!

I still suspect it is something to do with the card though, as I am able to get colour out of it when I run the card under windows.

Thanks for all your help and suggestings peoples.

I'll let you know how I go with the new digital Nebula tuner card.

Cheers,
TS.