Sunday, November 19, 2006

pvr500 and composite input

I'd really like to access DVDs through the MythTV interface, as well as be able to hook up my camcorder and convert analog video to MPEG2 streams. My TV has only one composite input and that's taken by MythTV, so the DVD thing is mostly for convenience. The catch? It doesn't seem to work.

I got the closest today. After scouring Google and reading lots and lots of different How-tos the most promising approach for getting the DVD player/camcorder hooked up was to define a new video source, bind it to the composite input, manually define a channel and off we go. Uhm, yeah. Not quite. The new channel (1001 - DVD) shows up in the channel selection. However, when I do select it, apparently MythTV tries to use the tuner to select it, which doesn't work. Either, the channel doesn't switch, and I continue to see Fox and then roll over to channel 82, or depending on which approach I tried, the channel switches and I won't get out of this mode anymore, and only got a black screen. Even [ESC] didn't work anymore. Couldn't tell whether the front-end or the back-end hung.

What's more frustrating is that even with ivtvctl -p, I can't seem to switch inputs on the PVR500. It does work, however, if I don't start mythbackend at all on boot. I'm suspecting an issue between MythTV, the ivtv driver, and the PVR500 card.


I'm using Linux 2.6.15 with ivtv 0.4.4. Looks like I'm going to sync grumpy to the latest Debian testing, 2.6.18 and ivtv 0.7 (or so). And then rebuild the nvidia driver, and take care of other mayhem that might ensue. I'm hoping this will also fix the problems we have with closed captioning (VBI).

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