[mythtvnz] DTT testing - Wellington

[Michael Dilger]

Douglas Pearless wrote:
> Well, I have my Hauppauge Nova T 500 working, and mythfrontend 
> occasionally crashes with a segment fault. 
>
> My processor is way underpowered (Celeron D running at 2.85GHz with 
> 512MB or RAM!) so it is very jerky.
>
> I have not sound, as I understand the NZ setp is a bit different...
>
> I tried the weekly mythbuntu builds, but that completely broke my 
> installation so I gave up and re-installed from scratch (mythbuntu 8.04).
>
> Does anyone have mythtv working properly with DVB-T (preferably with a 
> Nova T 500)?
>
> Cheers Douglas
>   
I have MythTV 0.21, and a Nova T 500, but I can't say that they are 
working well together yet.  Yes, I can scan for and find the channels.  
And I can flip to them.  But more often than not the video stream 
crashes mythfrontend.  And when it doesn't, it pauses for 500ms then 
plays for 500ms in a slow perpetual stutter cycle.

Even mplayer svn trunk is not quite working with DTT video sources here 
in NZ, so I don't expect MythTV to be ready until the libraries it 
depends upon get updated.   "mplayer -vo xv -mc 5 -vf pp=fd -vfm ffmpeg 
-lavdopts skiploopfilter=all:fast -framedrop dvb://${CHANNEL}" works 
about 30% of the time, but 70% of the time the video gets stuck on the 
first frame, gets tremendously out of sync with the audio, and 
eventually the audio breaks up and it crashes sometime thereafter.   So 
I use the old fashioned method, called "try again", until the stream 
comes through clean.. after which it seems to play for as long as I care 
to watch that one channel.

As far as I can tell, most of my problems (mplayer crashing) are in 
libfaad2.  I can gdb step right to the problem (a null pointer) but 
don't know the code well enough to write a patch.   I posted on the 
mplayer developer list, and all I got back was the sound of crickets.  
And apparently from the webpage, libfaad2 (www.audiocoding.com) hasn't 
been updated in a while.

So I don't have a hell of a lot of hope for anything more useful in the 
near future.  And I disabled the DTT channels in MythTV;  easier to just 
stick with the analog ones for now, and watch DTT with mplayer directly.

-Mike