Lothar’s Build Log R0.2.4

Ok, I finally did it.  I found out where my video issue was while running Mythtv under Linux.  The symptom that I saw was that when using xv-blit as the rendering setting under the Playback setup menu, Mythtv would show the first three or so seconds of the video and then appear to hang.  When I look at the terminal that launched the frontend, I saw a lot of audio buffer underrun messages.  Once I saw this I changed the audio playback device to NULL. When I did this the video played back properly, leading me to believe that it was an audio driver issue.  After a couple weeks of web searching I realized that the problem was not with the audio subsystem at all.  In fact, that problem was usually seen on systems that couldn’t keep up with the video demands.  After reading this, I quickly ran top and found that Mythtv was using nearly all of my CPU resources.  In my case, it turned out to be caused by the video driver not running correctly.  As it turns out, I ran across this page , and at the very bottom someone mentioned the same problem.  What ended up fixing it? Well, it was actually very simple.  All I needed to do was open up my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, which enables and disables various features of the video driver and X server, and add the line


Option "TexturedVideo" "true"


to my device section (where fglrx is called out as the driver).  After a quick reboot (actually I used Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart the X server) I was up and running using the proper video renderer.  Once that was done everything was working as well as I had expected from the start of the build.

So now I’m finally becoming happy with my frontend rebuild.  All that I need to do still is finish getting my remote to work again.  I’ve already got it programmed and configured I just need to make it start correctly at powerup.  After that I am pretty much sitting where I was before my last frontend died a horrible and painful death.  Then I will finally be able to move on to bigger and better things!  So let’s see…  I started this in June and it’s now almost Halloween…  4 months to build a system.  Not exactly what I would call a performance record.  Oh well.  Persistence has paid off.  Hopefully now I’ll have more time to go back and explore virtualization and DVD ripping a little more closely.

Now if only my server wasn’t about to reach capacity…  Might be time for expansion…  Will it ever end?!?