[mythtv-users] capture card suddenly doesn't work

Greg Woods greg at gregandeva.net
Sun Jun 5 20:24:27 UTC 2005


Thanks for the response. I have at least some progress already.

On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 17:30 +0100, Nick wrote:

> It looks like it could be that the starting channel for live tv is not
> set correctly, and so that card cannot lock to it.

It appears to be OK when I look at the setup options. It's just set to
channel 3, which is a local broadcast station on Comcast.



>  If scheduled
> recordings work, this would seem likely.

No, that doesn't work either. I can schedule something, and it shows up
on the list, but when it comes time to record, all it does is create an
empty .nuv file (I'm trying another one to start a few minutes from now
just to verify this).


>  If nothing works at all (live
> tv or preset recordings) it would follow that the channels setup is
> not correct.

At one point, I wiped out the entire database (DROP DATABASE
mythconverg;)  and completely redid mc.sql, mythtv-setup, and all the
reconfigurations through the Utilities/Setup screens in myth-frontend.
Everything was downloaded again from ZapIt. It didn't help.

>  If you are also trying to watch LiveTV and the last
> channel you were watching is now off-air 

No, that's not it. It's not off-air. It looks fine on the TV.

> Are you able to use the card outside of Myth? 

Excellent suggestion. In fact, I didn't really know HOW to use the card
outside of Myth, so I did some poking around and discovered "xawtv". I
got that installed, and it works fine for watching TV. So I presume that
means it's not Comcast, house wiring, computer hardware, or a driver
problem. It has to be within Myth (or my configuration of it) somewhere.
But at least with xawtv installed I can watch live TV. I still want to
get Myth going as I do want the DVR features, but being able to watch
live TV makes it less time critical to get it fixed.

One thing I do note that must be related somehow: after it stopped
working, when I bring up myth-frontend, the window comes up without a
border (no top bar), and when things were working, it had this and I was
able to drag the window around the screen, right-click the bar to "Put
on all workspaces" (I'm using GNOME), etc. Now there is no top bar to
grab, so I can't move the window.  I have configured it not to use full
screen by default, but going back to using full screen doesn't help
either. I also notice that when I do most anything (such as, click on a
guide entry to schedule a recording), it takes a LONG time to come back
to the previous screen again (and sometimes it hangs and never comes
back, and some of these hangs result in mythbackend crashing or exiting;
it ain't there any more and the next time I start mythfrontend, I get
the "Can't connect to master server, is it running?" error (because it
wasn't running). But restarting it puts me right back where I was this
morning: attempting to watch live TV gets a "cannot sync" error.

--Greg




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