[mythtv-users] Black screen on one channel plus some other random comments

[Steve]

Hi there,

I've been using Myth for a few months now on an Asus Pundit machine, running
Gentoo Linux with very few problems.  An excellent piece of work.  My only
limitation is that I'm currently just restricted to UK terrestrial TV until
I get round to buying/building an IR transmitter to control my freeview box,
but that's not the fault of Myth ;-)

However, now that the system is well and truly bedded in, there's a few
things I want to ask.

Firstly, a problem that seems to have cropped up lately that I can't figure
out - I unplugged everything for a week while I was doing some work around
the TV.  Now for some reason, I can't get one of the channels (ITV).  ITV
works fine going through the TV but on Myth I just get the audio stream and
a black screen although the other terrestrial channels all work fine.  No
errors of any sort appear in the mythbackend logfile.  I fiddled with the
aerial cable - actually, I unplugged it and got a very bad picture - about
what you'd expect with just a cable plugged in and no aerial at the other
end.  Plugged it back in and it worked fine, but as soon as I changed off
the channel and back again it was back to black screen.  I've not been able
to reproduce that though!
I'm wondering if there's something funny about the incoming ITV signal that
Myth's not coping with - has anyone else seen this?  It was working fine
with the same version of Myth (0.11) before I unplugged the box for a
week...

Next: is there any way of performing some sort of colour/brightness balance
on the video signal or is that the fault of my capture card (Hauppage WinTV
PCI)?  Watching or recording video usually has excessive brightness and/or
contrast and there's no way to change it.  There do seem to be keys to
change those, but they don't work and just show -1.  They also don't work
consistently in different modes (live/playback) - I'm not actually near my
machine so I can't check.  Mythvideo uses similar keys for controlling
brightness etc which do work, and having changed the settings, they seem to
carry across back into the capture modes too, but aren't persistent across
restarts.

I've not got a remote control set up yet either - I'm still using keyboard,
which works well albeit a bit cumbersome.  When I do get a remote working
though, I might have some difficulties with key layout - most keys seem to
be intuitive and consistent between modes, but some keys either do different
functions, or the same functions are on different keys - particularly when
comparing Mythvideo to MythTV playback for instance.  Are keys easily
changeable?  (I've not looked into that yet and won't until I have the time
to set up the remote but thought I'd tack it on the end).

Overall, Myth is a great system and looks superb - several people have seen
it and commented on how polished it looks.  There's still some things that
other commercial systems do that it doesn't (yet) - Tivo-style automatic
recording by guesswork for instance, and the record quality is perhaps not
quite as good (on my hardware) but hopefully in time these things will come
about...

Finally, for Playstation2 owners - I bought a USB dual playstation2
controller adapter from Play.com (about 6 pounds I think), plugged it into
my Myth box and with no other configuration needed, the Playstation
controller immediately worked in Mame ;-)

Steve.