[mythtv-users] Video card hell. Need help.

Craig Huff huffcslists at gmail.com
Sun Sep 12 19:00:00 UTC 2010


I am trying to set up a second FE.  I built a new system using an ASUS
M4A785-M mobo which has an integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 GPU, but no
S-Video (TV-Out), so I added a PCI GeForce 8400GS card.  Shouldn't be
part of the problem, but for full disclosure, there's also a PCI WiFi
card installed.  I have one stick of 1GB DDR2 Kingston RAM installed.

I was having a problem with video display using the 8400GS card when
trying to watch MythTV live or playing back recordings because they
were jerky.  This turned out (thanks to the advice from this list!) to
be due to a bug with newer Nvidia cards driving the system into nearly
100% CPU loading trying to deal with the slow refresh rate of the
TV-Out display.

My solution was supposed to be simply replace the 8400GS with an older
GeForce 6200 PCI card.

Well...

After some struggling, I had it working for one shining moment.  And
then I rebooted.

Both before the momentary success and afterwards, I have a system that
won't finish booting up, much less getting to the point of an X
display.

When I look in /var/log/messages, it only seems to get a dozen or two
lines past the starting up message before it completely locks up.  I
have been shooting in the dark hoping to find a BIOS memory setting
that might play nicer, but I'm getting frustrated and running out of
bullets so to speak.

Any assistance the list can provide would be _greatly_ appreciated.

TIA,

Craig.


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