I'm running Knoppmyth R5F27

The hardware...
HP Pavillion a1030e-2 (PY205AV)
Sempron 3000+ processor
1 GB RAM
onboard sound
19” CRT
ATI TV Wonder Pro video capture card
ATI 9500 Pro graphics card
ATI Remote Wonder

The problem...
Once a video has been started, either live TV or a recorded program, all aspects of the MythTV frontend menu are garbled/corrupted. Going back to a menu (via ESC) or pulling up the Program Guide (by pressing “S” while watching live TV) displays garbled text. The small video remains clear while the Program Guide is on screen, but, the actual guide is garbled. Even the Fluxbox desktop is garbled when I close the MythTV frontend after watching video. Text brought up while watching live TV (such as show info by pressing “I” or pressing “A” to bring up the Time Stretch gauge) displays fine. Restarting X (CTRL+ALT+Backspace) returns everything back normal, until I watch live TV or another video. I have searched everywhere for a solution and had no luck.

I suspect that it has something to do with my ATI graphics card, but, only because they are generally finicky in Linux. I have an NVIDIA 6200 graphics card I could swap out, but, I'm somewhat leery of doing that because I don't want to have to reinstall from scratch. In case you're wondering why I didn't start off with the NVIDIA card in my Knoppmyth box, it's because I was using it in another Linux box. I tried moving my capture card to one of my other Linux computers (a 1 GHz Duron box and a 1.2 GHz Celeron box), but, watching live TV was a nightmare with the video briefly freezing every second or so (audio was fine). I suspect that's caused by those processors not being strong enough to both record and play back video at the same time because once a video was recorded, it played fine.

Any suggestions? I'd appreciate it. Having to restart X every time I watch video is really frustrating. This problem has existed ever since I installed KnoppMyth and it's finally become too much to deal with.

Out of curiosity, I'd like to know if my thoughts about the other two computers are correct: Are those two processors just too slow to handle watching live TV with that capture card? To tell you the truth, I'd actually prefer to have one of those *lesser* computers as my PVR and my Sempron 3000+ as my Linux desktop computer.

I don't know what other information you need so please let me know.

Thanks in advance.

sixsixeight

I'm afraid I don't have a solution, but I, too, am also experiencing this. Running Debian Unstable (originally KnoppMyth), latest Unstable X.org with the latest X.org Radion drivers (for an ATI 9600), latest svn build of MythTV (I compile it myself).

I agree that it's most likely the ATI driver, as I previously had this machine running on its built-in Intel i810 video using the same software, and it didn't experience this problem.

I'm going to try to install the proprietry ATI drivers downloaded from the ATI/AMD site, if those don't fix it I'll swap out the graphics.

I'm not overly familiar with the latest builds of KnoppMyth, but I would've thought you shouldn't have to reinstall the entire lot to use a different graphics card. Just try putting the Nvidia card in and cross your fingers - it should be auto-detected. If X doesn't come up, you'll have to run "dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" (without the quotes) from the shell, this should then work.

Oh yeah, not sure on the capabilities of the Wonder Pro capture card - if it's got built-in MPEG2 encoding then your lesser machines may work alright as Myth boxes, though they're probably a bit underpowered, but if it hasn't then you'd be better off with something like a Hauppauge PVR 150 MCE - you can pick them up fairly cheaply on eBay if you're lucky (circa £20/$40). Also of note - if you use a graphics card that supports XVMC you may be able to get away with it, as this significantly reduces CPU load when playing back video, but unfortunately the ATIs don't. The Nvidia does, I think, though, so may be worth a try.

Good luck!

Confirmed as a bug with the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver. Or, at least, I installed the proprietary ATI Linux drivers and the problem no longer occurs:
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linu ... adeon.html

I couldn't get OpenGL working properly, but that's an issue with the proprietary drivers themselves (I can live without it - just means no fancy fades on the menus.)

One thing I wanted to toss out there (though I don't know much about any ATI problems)... is to test your RAM. I had a very odd display problem going on for quite some time before I found it to be a bad DIMM.

Basically, with many video cards (and/or onboard video sets), part of the video memory comes from your main RAM. If there is some problem there, it will likely look much like a video problem.

Here is the thread where I was trying to explain my issue:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=15937&highlight=
(there is a link there with some screen shots to show how wacky the problem was)

I found it because I was having the same kind of issues with the onboard video as with a new nVidia card... which got me looking beyond the video card.

I think there is a RAM test utility on the install CD, though you'd have to look around to find out how to use it. I was trying various MythTV builds at the time, so I had a Mythbuntu install CD made... and they have a RAM test (uses the same utility) available from the main menu.

The only catch is that you probably need to run it for a day or so unless the RAM is horribly messed up... it takes a long time to catch flakiness (which is often the case). I think it caught the problem in mine after about 5 or 6 hours... but be prepared to let it run like 24-48 hours before you can be fairly sure your RAM is OK. It's not a bad thing to rule out anyway if you are having issues.

-Steve

Thanks for the tips, folks. I've not had time to test anything yet--real life reared its ugly head and then my main computer went on the fritz. I'll test out these suggestions in the near future and report back what I find.