Ryan's Scraps

While I don’t yet have a TV capture card (FedEx should be delivering my Hauppage PVR-250 today), I’ve gotten TV-out working and have MythTV fully installed and working. I have to say the folks over at MythTV have done a wonderful job with their installation packages and documentation. Jarod’s guide is great also, although I believe there are a few variances when using MythTV-0.13 and I had to install my NVidia driver differently. I may put out a revised guide at some point to detail the steps I had to take. It’s important to note that every hurdle I had to overcome was a Linux-hardware issue and not a MythTV issue. What a great software package!

The current problem I’m having is that my TV-Out is a bit fuzzy and wavy. I’ve played with the overscan and resolutions, but to no avail. I’m wondering if it’s my onboard nForce IGP graphics that’s the culprit and I need to upgrade to a seperate video card?

My long awaited project of building my own Tivo-like device has finally started. I’ve just put together the box and have RedHat 9 installed. I plan to use MythTV as my PVR software. It seems to be the most active and feature filled of the bunch (Freevo seems to be the other popular choice).

At this point I’m having trouble getting the NVidia driver loaded (for TV-out). I’m using the install guide here (and am even using the exact hardware of Jarod’s system) but my XFree config doesn’t want to work. The log keeps saying something to the effect of “can’t load NVIDIA module”. I know Jarod’s setup uses a seperate NVidia video card instead of the TV-out functionality of the Chaintech 7NIF2 motherboard (which is what I’m trying to use), but I was hoping I could get it to work.

Here’s my setup:

• Coolermaster ATC case
• Chaintech 7NIF2 MB w/ onboard ethernet/video/TV-out/sound
• Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton)
• 200 GB HD

How frustrating linux still is, but I knew this was a real possibility before I started, or else I would gotten a Tivo…