[mythtv-users] mythtv won't reliably grab from /dev/video

[Geoffrey Hausheer]

P4 1.6GHz
Soundblaster 16
AverTV Stereo capture card
Debian Unstable
Asus 7700 (Nvidia Geforce 2), using 'nv' driver
MythTV 0.8
2.4.20 kernel

Well, I thought I was finally getting very close to having mythTV
actually work.  Initially I was trying to use the SVideo0in on the
Geforce card via riva-tv, but it kept crashing in the audiio code when
recording.  I have no idea why riva-tv was interacting with the audio,
but I tried 3 audio cards, and 2 compleetly different systems, and it
kept doing the same thing.  If using mp3 encoding, it would segfault in
the lamemp3 library.  If using uncompressed data, it would record for a
while, but  eventually crash.  Although xawtv worked fine, ffmpeg had a
similar problem:  It  would crash whenever using mp3, or when the image
size wasn't the default (370x280, or whatever).

I finally gave up and bought the AverTV card (the only stereo-input card
they had in stock), which works fine with xawtv and ffmpeg except for the
tuner won't correctly tune half of my channels (evven with adjustments).
Regardless, I only need SVideo for now (using an IR blaster with the
cablebox to tune).

As I said, with the new card, using the bttv driver, ffmpeg is no longer
crashing, and I can encode 720x480 w/ mpeg4 and mp3 okay.

So I tried out mythTv again, and it seemed to be working fine.  LiveTV,
recording, the works.  But after closing it and restarting, mythtv
stopped working.  it just sits there waiting, or sometimes mythbackend
will say 'Can't open /dev/video: Device in use' or whatever the message
is.   But lsof shows that nothing is using /dev/video, and sure enough,
ffmpeg and xawtv still work fine.

So I played around for a while, and found that if I rmmoded and modprobed
bttv (and its components), I could sometimes get mythtv to record exactly
once (but this doesn't alway work).  I can not get  it to play livetv  at
all.  It doesn't matter what I set the resolution to.  I have tried all
of the likely things...rebooted, reinstalled mythtv, etc.

For now, I think I'll just write some scripts to interface with the mysql
database, and record using ffmpeg, since I can live without the liveTV
stuff for a bit, but I'd really like to get this working, and it seems so
close to doing so.

Any ideas what I should try now?

.Geoff  
-- 
  Geoffrey Hausheer
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