PVR and other technical difficulties…

Well, with LiveJournal having a wellspring of technical problems today, I thought it would make a good backdrop for me to discuss my PVR that I am making out of my Linux machine.

Everything went very well with the hardware installation and clean Fedora Core 1 installation, as did the first eleven steps of the Fedora Myth(TV)ology guide.

I made it through the configuration of the video capture card driver, as well as the tests that outputted a test pattern and some captured video right to my TV. “Hooray,” I thought, “my card works! This is going to be smooth sailing!”

Wrong. The next step was reconfiguring X Windows to use the capture card’s TV-out to display X Windows output via the TV so I can see the system when it doesn’t have a monitor hooked up. I have not yet successfully gotten this to work, but I’m pretty confident that it is a settings change and not the card, since the video tests work.

My theory is that a.) I’m not setting up the configuration correctly, b.) the driver might be getting cleared somehow, or c.) magical gnomes live inside my Linux machine and are trying to steal my magic bag.

I went ahead and installed the drivers to my IR remote port, which is also on the offending TV capture card. It worked like a charm. I’m basically stuck at this point, because it seems that the MythTV software also has a similar problem not displaying on my TV when I try the Watch Live TV feature. This may be due to some reports that MythTV clears the video card driver before starting, so it probably clears my fancy setup that made the tests work. Everything else seems to work fine, all the way down to it grabbing my program listings for my local Insight Digital lineup.

So it’ll be a few days of debugging, but hopefully this thing will work just fine once I get done. It doesn’t help matters that my domain host has my webmail down today, so I can’t even check the mailing lists to see if some kind soul has replied to my requests for help. Ah well, there’s gotta be something for tonight.