[mythtv-users] venetian blind picture

[Greg Woods]

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 01:15 -0600, Chad wrote:

> > As far as mythtv is able to tell, it is working. Recordings get made and
> > stored, they can be seen in the "Manage" section, it's just that the
> > parameters for the recording are incorrect so what gets saved is
> > garbage.

Miraculously, I was finally able to fix this! 

The key, it seemed to me, was that I was able to watch live TV, but
couldn't make any non-garbled recordings. Being able to watch live TV
presumably rules out all sorts of possible problems, including hardware,
the card settings, channel settings, and the like. So where do Live TV
and scheduled recordings differ? I think I found the answer. In
mythfrontend, under

Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> Recording -> Software
Encoders (v4l)

there is one for Live TV and one for Default. I went painstakingly
through all the submenus for these to find where they were different. It
turns out that the second screen under Default set the resolution to
720x480. Under Live TV, it was set to 480x480. So I changed the
Default's resolution there to 480x480, and poof! Now my recordings work.
It was never a de-interlacing problem at all! This little faux pas kept
me down for a week. I have no idea how or why this got changed, but at
least it keeps me from having to rebuild the entire database from
scratch.

So now the $65,000 question: is there any way to recover the old
recordings made while things while things were set wrong now that I know
exactly what *was* wrong? It turns out that my MythTV and my VCR decided
to screw up on the same night and I missed getting the recordings of the
premier of SciFi Friday; new season-premiere episodes of three of my
wife's favorite shows. I sure could increase the WAF for MythTV a lot if
I could somehow recover those garbled recordings so we could see those
missed episodes thanks to the fact that I had MythTV!

Thanks for everyone who helped me out.

--Greg