I'm struggling with PVR-350 tv-output and I've seen posts in this forum which suggest that the ivtv that came with R4V2 didn't work. Before I go recompiling ivtv, has anyone here gotten the stock R4V3 ivtv to work?

I followed the Tiki how-to and I was able to get a blinking cursor on the tv (which I've also seen posted here). It brought back nostalgic feelings about my old apple //c !

I got it to work just fine with the ivtv from R4V2 on a friends system. I don't know who told you that version didn't work, unless you are talking about divx playback then no versions work. (well anyways)

I got it to work with R4V3. I copied the XF86config-4.pvr350-example file over the XF86config-4. Then added ivtv-fb into /etc/modules if I remember right. chgrp mythtv for /dev/fb1 and also chmod. Can't remember the exact command, as well as enabling it in the gui. There was more but I think those are the main things.

R4v2 and R4v3 both worked great for me. I did all the steps acor mentioned except for using the pre-existing XF86config-4.pvr350-example file because my comp has issues with the mouse settings in the file.

I wonder why /dev/fb1 is still never the correct group/mode in all the different versions of Knoppmyth I have intalled.

You will see the error using dmesg:
Warning: Remapping obsolete /dev/fb* minor 32 to 1

To fix do:
rm /dev/fb0autodetect
rm /dev/fb1
mknod /dev/fb1 c 29 1
chmod 666 fb1
chown mythtv fb1

This fix is in the forum somewhere. The owner of /dev/fb1 is root before the change.

I tried to add it to /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv, maybe that was my mistake. Could you post your diffs to /etc modules?

/etc/modules is nothing more than a list of modules you want loaded on boot one module per line. If I remember correctly when I did it I just added ivtv-fb as the last line.

Could you post that line for me?

What about the other settings listed in the howto (i.e. options saa7127 enable_output=1 outputselect=0)?

I did
ivtv-fb
like I said /etc/modules is just a list of modules not arguments not options nothing just one module name per line.

The pieces are starting to fall into place. I read the Tiki guide a little closer and found



I was trying to fix this at runlevel three and each time I tried to load the ivtv-fb module the console screen would appear to freeze. By going in via ssh I was able to get X (almost) working. Is it normal for the console screen to completely freeze? The keyboard still seems to work.

Right now I'm having trouble with the alpha blending on the menu. At first the blending is perfect, I can see & hear the channel blended behind the menu. It's stable until I use the up or down keys. I've read in the forums that alpha problems might be caused by permissions problems on my devices, so I tried changing /dev/fb* to "rw-rw-rw" for "mythtv mythtv". Any suggestions on where to go from here? Thanks very much for the help so far, the tv-out looks very crisp, and it's exciting to finally have it so close to working!

I have found that if I have no monitor attached to the video card the tv will just display
the blinking cursor at boot up ! With the monitor attached the bootup completes and
everything works great (except dvd playback)
I not sure how the system even knows about the monitor, but its a real pain

A hardware fix for monitor detection is to connect a 75 ohm resistor between any of the RGB lines and earth on the video card 15 pin connector. Worth a quick google to find a decent how to. I think it is pin 1 to pin 6, but check it out on the net before you do any damage. I had to do this for a server I wanted to run without a screen using VNC. As VNC uses the framebuffer on the card the card need to think it is connected to a monitor.

Don't know if you've already gotten your answer but...



I added my info to /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv. I added these lines to the end:



They may not have all been necessary; I didn't feel like rebooting several times to figure out which parts were needed and which weren't.

_________________
Athlon 700 + PVR-350. KnoppMyth R5A16. ReiserFS on an LVM volume for myth data. Thanks to SnapperDragon, everything seems quite happy.

Thanks, I found I needed all three pins 1->6, 2->7, 3->8 with 75 ohms for my video card
to be happy.


Now rebooting is no problem, just as well as it seem to lockup just about evey day
It always locks up when scrolling fast though the program guide !
has anyone else seen this problem ?

My system was very unstable, and moving to ext2 helped a lot. Check out these threads:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... hlight=cut
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... hlight=xfs

However I'm still seeing some unstability. The backend seems to have stopped responding on its own when I was away on vacation. The entire machine occasionally locks up when I'm watching a recording.

In general, there are ivtv (the hardware encoder/decoder driver) problems. I'm hoping that the newer version will help; the changelog seems to indicate that there were a lot of things fixed after the 0.1.9 release. When 0.1.10 comes out, I'll be trying it out to see if it fixes my problems.

Basically, you can't really do both things with the PVR-350, yet. But I'm hopeful for the next release...

_________________
Athlon 700 + PVR-350. KnoppMyth R5A16. ReiserFS on an LVM volume for myth data. Thanks to SnapperDragon, everything seems quite happy.