First: it may be a simple mplayer / sound config problem and thus not absolutely related to KnoppMyth. Please excuse if so!

I'm quite new to Linux and was searching for THE linux distribution best supporting mythtv... and found KnoppMyth being the ideal distribution to start with!

(':lol:') Installation worked like a charm! GREAT JOB!!! I'm absolutely enthusiastic because I fiddled around mythTV with several other distributions (SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, ...) but KnoppMyth really was by far the easiest thing to install and setup. Even the nforce2 and nvidia drivers installation was really easy! (':D')

However, I have no sound at all. My hardware:

Gigabyte K7 Triton Mobo (nforce2 chipset), model GA-7N400 Pro
NVidia GF 440 MX graphic card
WinTV PVR 350
WinTV Express (BT878)

Network is up and running, MythTV runs, I believe I even could watch TV if only I already had setup/configured all channels and frequencies (I live in Switzerland).

But before all that I want to have sound working, as several posts mention that mythtv could hang or cause other problems if sound is not working properly.

mplayer -ao alsa9 musicfile.ogg

seems theoretically to work (no error messages) but it hangs where it should begin counting the played seconds and percentage... keeps looking like that:

[...]
starting playback...
A: 0.0 0.0% 0%
[...]

A CTRL-C shows then:

MPlayer interrupted by signal 2 in module: play_audio
ALSA lib pcm_hw.c :523(snd_pcm_hw_drain) SNDRV_PCM_IOCTL_DRAIN failed: Input/output error
alsa-uninit: pcm drain error: Input/output error

I couldn't find any useful hints or tips on this one. I can't see any errors during booting (dmesg). I stopped mythtv before using mplayer command above.

Any ideas out there? THANKS![/code]

well first thing is a little nit picky, but mythtv does not use mplayer to play back it's video files, it has a it's own video player, so if it is indeed an mplayer problem then mythtv may still work for tv.

Next you could look at your modules and see if the sound modules are loaded. lsmod | grep snd and lsmod | grep intel (if you are running onboard sound.) there is also a sound configuration utility, but I can't remember the command right now and my mythtv box is boxed up from my move.

Thank for the quick answer. Is MPlayer really not used in mythtv? I thought I saw some mplayer commands in the settings of mythMusic for audio CD playback. But I'm not quite sure about, I'm in the office right now so can't verify it.

Will check whether or not the modules are loaded once again tonight (I think they were but maybe I missed something).

Is alsaconfig part of KnoppMyth? I couldn't find it. alsamixer is, afaik correctly configured.

Could it help to upgrade to alsa 1.02? Or is this an mplayer problem? After issueing the command



It still hangs at



Any other ideas how to resolve this?

When everything will be running, I'd like to post a "Howto" for Switzerland (PAL-Land)... or is there one out there already (didn't find one)?

mplayer is used for video playback from the dvd and videos sections, and possibly for the cd/music playback stuff. I don't use the music part, so not positive about that, however it is not used to record and playback tv.

I finally figured it out... seems to hang together with my 2 WinTV Cards. I pulled one out and tested it again. With just one WinTV Card built in, MPlayer is now able to play sound as expected!

So first I will continue to setup/configure my MythTV Box with just one single WinTV card inside. But afterwards I would like to be able to use both... one for recording (WinTV PVR 350) and the second one for live TV on another channel simultaneously.

Will search the archives for postings around that before troubling you again here... might become a bit tricky, I suppose?

Thanks to Xsecrets anyway for trying to help me out concerning the sound issue I had with MPlayer...

if that's the case the most likely cause is where everything was plugged in. you might need to shuffle the cards around. sounds like the sound card and one of the wintv cards was conflicting, probably an irq conflict.