...or, perhaps I should say, I think they're weird. But I'm a bit new to this. I know technology & systems well, linux OK, but the digital video thing is a different matter...

First off, here's my system (frontend & backend):

IBM NetVista
P4 1.8GHz
256MB of RAM
Hauppauge PVR-150
GeForce FX 5200 PCI graphics card (128MB RAM)
40G hard drive (I'll be adding another soon)
KnoppMyth R5E50
Onboard sound

After a bit of tinkering, I seem to be on the right track, with a few exceptions. The most pressing problem is with the video during playback or while watching live TV (which, from what I understand, isn't really "live", but is, rather, a continuous playback of the MPEG stream, right? ...just curious). It's hard to describe... for short periods (i.e. a few seconds) it's fine. Other times, however it flickers, and looks like the tracking is off; it almost looks like the old scrambled cable TV signals, but not quite. Oddly enough, it seems to get bad only when there is a significant amount of motion on the screen. This is a problem with both the TV and HDMI outputs.

I'm pretty sure I have the most recent drivers for the video card. CPU utilization hovers around 30-35% while watching live TV. I've tried every different encoding/decoding/deinterlacing combination I can think of.

So now I'm out of ideas. I don't even know if it's a problem with the encoding or decoding. I've searched the forums, but I can't seem to come up with a search term that accurately identifies my problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance... and a big thanks to everyone behind this project! 'Tis very exciting!

- Sean

Well, let's start with some more information:

* The Section "Device" of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf
* The output from sed -n '/= START INIT IVTV/,/= END INIT IVTV/p' </var/log/messages
* What are you currently using for deint/MPEG decoding in the Playback settings?
* When you say you believe you "have the most recent drivers for the video card", what would those be and how did you install them?

I have had cheap CATV splitters cause all sorts of problems - When the cable is plugged directly into the TV you no longer see the problems?

Check the DMA, bump the recording profile to 720x480 (there's a known bug with certain PVR-150 cards at "nonnative resolutions") , see the upgrade hints posting (http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13108) for other known issues (the known issues and most of the known changes there also apply to scratch installs), see the troubleshooting pages on the wiki (http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=TroubleShooting) for general issues, paying special attention to the PictureQualityIssues page there.

Thanks to both of you for your help. It turned out that it was as tjc said - a problem with the resolution setting and a bug in the pvr-150.

Thanks!

Well, sure, of course it was. That's why we keep him around!