[mythtv-users] Why do I need to launch frontend with "-O ThemePainter=OpenGL"? And what relation does this have with vnc?

[Matt Beadon]

I often check on my myth system over vnc since I don't have a keyboard
attached but ever since I installed it I've been hampered by the fact that
the frontend doesn't always update the screen over vnc.
So what I'd see is that on the tv all the menus would appear but over vnc I
would just see the background image.  This didn't seem to change with
different themes so I grumbled and figured it was something odd about
vnc/frontend.

Then I had a crash (likely HVR-2250 related) and after restarting the menus
had disappeared from the tv as well as over vnc.  After poking around the
logs&web I found an old suggestion from this mailing list archive that
pointed me to using "-O ThemePainter=qt" when launching the frontend.  I
tried it and [insert sounds of marching bands] poof now the menu works on
the tv and over vnc.  :-)
I guessed that "-O ThemePainter=OpenGL" would also work and since I have a
geforce 9300 I decided to use it instead of qt.  This choice was based on
the setup comments that said something to the effect of "if you have decent
hw use opengl".

My questions are:
1) have I got something misconfigured that requires this ThemePainter
argument or is this a default that should be added for everyone?
2) Any ideas how a crash on ext3 drives could change the behaviour of the FE
like this?  Anything I should check/repair?
3) Does anyone else have problems where watching a recording or livetv with
a vnc client attached causes the cpu to max out and create huge latency over
the network?  It gets so bad that even mythweb times out until I can get the
playback stopped then everything goes back to normal.  While this is
happening playback on the tv looks fine and using the remote has no unusual
delay.  It seems to be only the networked functions that suffer.

My config:
debian 5.0.2 Lenny with 0.21-fixes from debian multimedia repo
nForce 610 mobo with Geforce 9300 graphics card attached via svideo to
crappy SD tube tv.

thanks
Matt
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