[mythtv-users] No audio, odd video during recording

[Ray Olszewski]

At 11:51 AM 10/8/2003 -0500, Harlan wrote:
>Hello,
>   Being new to MythTV I have a few problems:
>
>1.  There is no audio during the recording.  I was able to watch xawtv and 
>use
>aplay to hear the audio, as suggested in the HOWTO.  There is no audio no
>matter which computer the playback occurs.

This sounds like you do not have the CAPTUR[E] device setting correct in 
amixer (or alsamixer, which I find easier to use). Make sure Line is 
selected as the CAPTUR device and that the CAPTUR device itself has a 
reasonable volume setting. There is more info on this in the HowTo; look 
around for it.

The other possibility is that Myth is using the wrong audio device. If you 
only have the one sound card, this is unlikely, but if you have multiple 
sound devices (for example, if you installed btaudio), make sure Myth is 
using the one assigned to the ES1371.

>2.  During the video playback, on another computer, I get green and red
>checked squares flashing very often.  If I playback the video on the computer
>it was recorded on, there are no flashing squares.

When I have had this same symptom (not with Myth), it was due to a codec 
mismatch. If you are playing back using something other than Myth itself, 
or the modified mplayer package that can read Myth's unique encoding 
format, this may be your problem.

Since you don't describe the "another computer" setup either here or below, 
nor how you are using it to play back video (what software? what CPU type 
and speed? are you actually transferrring the files, say via ftp or scp, or 
are you using NFS or Samba? how fast is the network connection?) I can't 
offer anything more specific than that.

Oh, one other thing I can note. If you are doing this with a file like the 
one you describe below, with around 200 MB/minute, that translates to about 
3.5 MB/sec, or about 27 Mbps. If your connection is 10BaseT or 802.11, you 
may be seeing an inability of the datastream to keep up with the playback. 
A 100 Mbps LAN should be able to keep up, but perhaps not if either there 
are other demands on the capacity or you have a crappy NIC in either of the 
machines.

>3.  The files created are very large.  A 5 minute segment is nearly 1 GB.
>What settings did I mess up?

Your report is too vague to say. Perhaps you have selected RTJPEG rather 
than MPEG4, -AND- you have a very high capture density (say 640x480), -AND- 
you have a very high bitrate selected. Or it may somehow be associated with 
your sound problem (I can't think of how, but I won't assume the two are 
unrelated). But we're not mind readers, so I can't say more. Tell us what 
settings you chose and we may be able to tell you what is causing the high 
capture bitrate.

>Setup:
>     Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 9).
>     WinTV Go
>     e-gforce 2 video card
>     Linux fndsrv1 2.4.20-gentoo-r5 #1 Sun Oct 5 20:41:46 CDT 2003 i686 
> Celeron
>(Coppermine) GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

What version of Myth? The 0.11 prepack from the MythTV site, CVS (how 
recent?), or a distro prepack (I think there is one for Gentoo)?

Do the problems that you described above occur only with timed capture, or 
are you seeing similar difficulties when watching"live" TV through Myth? 
("live" is in quotes because Myth buffers "live" TV, unlike xawtv which 
just plays it directly.)