[ale] NV X11 drivers, or MythTV and Debian stable, part II

[Bjorn Dittmer-Roche]

Hey all,

Just to let you know how the saga turned out. Anyone interested in
repeating this should read the ivtv FAQ, but I've mentioned my specific
issues with things like having an old version of X, using Debian Stable
(which is old) and having a somewhat wierd chipset on my motherboard.
Perhpas this will be of some use to a future googler.

Anyway, after no less than 8 kernel recompiles and much fussing (why isn't
Drew interested in doing this?) I finally got it working! I was surprised
by how many times I had to recompile to get it all working -- usually once
or twice get's the job done. The online FAQ tells you what modules you
need for ivtv so anyone recompiling their kernel for this should be
careful to check that first (some of the distro specific instructions
neglect to mention that ivtv actually depends on other modules!)

After I corrctly got the kernel and necessary modules compiled and loaded
(this is a pain as they are not managed automatically by depmod) I had to
fuss with the settings in the mythtv gui for a while. AFAIK, there is no
easy way to test the ivtv driver without something big and complex like
mythtv. The things I ended up selcting seem obvious to me now, but were
very confusing at the time, so this took time.

Anyway, with the right settings, audio and video came up, but were choppy,
so I recompiled the kernel again (this time making sure my IDE chipset was
included so it would use DMA) and there was a _slight_ improvement.

To improve this further, I needed to get my nvidia graphics chipset
working (mythtv told me so!). In the past, I always used vesa because I'm
not a graphics buff, but I went to the nvidia web site, downloded their
automagic driver installer and it worked beautifully after I edited
XF86Config-4 file as instructed. I was *really* *impressed* with NVidia --
it worked like a charm and all docs and explinations were really clear.
The only trouble I had was that the thought didn't even occure to me to
check the manufacturer's web site for the drivers until after much useless
googling.  It was nice that I could use the latest graphics drivers with a
fairly old version of X11.

Now playback is not choppy at all!

To get it to the point where everything worked at boot time, I had to edit
modules.conf to load the modules I needed and then I had to hack
/etc/init.d/mythtvbackend so that I could be sure the modules started up
right. (you have to use insmod to install some of the ivtv modules rather
than the usual modprobe. No idea why they can't just install them into
the right place and have dependencies managed in the usual way.)

I still get an error at boot time saying it can't create /.qt. I think
the mythtv backend is starting with / as wd instead of ~mythtv but it
works anyway, so I'm not complaining. maybe if I have time later I'll hack
the start script a bit more to make sure it starts in the right place.

Phew!

The only missing piece is the remote still doesn't work, but that should
be a pice of cake after all this!!!

Thanks to anyone who gave advice about hardware and software! The PVR-250
get's surprisingly good reception and I am happy to now be able to watch
and tape TV with my computer!


	bjorn