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Irony

It’s pretty ironic that I maintain a guide on how easy it is to get MythTV working on Ubuntu, but when I upgraded my own MythTV box from Dapper to Edgy I completely broke it. I can sum the problems up in just two words: bloody ATI.

It’s a well known fact that ATI cards have flaky Linux support, but my Radeon 9250 has served me pretty well… until now. It turns out that by adding Xorg 7.1 support (required for Edgy) to driver 8.27, ATI broke their VideoOverlay feature. This means that you can only see the top half of the picture, no matter what resolution you use. Without VideoOverlay, the picture suffers from horrible tearing.

Anyway, a bit of googling and I learned that the problem was already fixed in version 8.30 of the driver. Great, I thought, and promptly installed the latest version. To my horror, it turns out that ATI dropped support for my 9250 card in version 8.29!

So, I did what I should have done long ago – sent off for an Nvidia 5200. Thanks to the wonders of http://www.dabs.com/, I had it in my grubby mitts just 10 hours later (standard delivery!). Within 10 minutes of sticking it into my PC, I had a great picture on my TV.

The moral? Linux and ATI – just don’t do it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 1:45 pm and is filed under MythTV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

19 Responses to “Irony”

  1. Chris Samuel Says:
    December 2nd, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    Hi Garry, any reason for not using the Xorg open source drivers rather than the proprietary ATI ones ? Just curious as I’ve got a 9250 as well (though not using it for MythTV)..

    cheers,
    Chris

  2. Garry Says:
    December 3rd, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    Hi Chris,

    I’d love to be wrong, but I’ve never got TV-out to work with anything other than the proprietary drivers.

  3. Chris Samuel Says:
    December 15th, 2006 at 7:23 am

    That would do it!

    Googling around for it just now I found that this person seems to have had some success by patching it using information from this page.

  4. MythTV HOW-TO on Ubuntu Edgy at The Musings of Chris Samuel Says:
    December 15th, 2006 at 8:46 am

    [...] Note to self – remember to check for responses to my comment on his ATI driver problems. [...]

  5. Garry Says:
    December 15th, 2006 at 10:59 am

    Thanks for that Chris, but as I’ve thrown my ATI card in the bin now, I can’t confirm it myself!

    Let me know if you have any success, though.

  6. zyprexa Says:
    December 30th, 2006 at 4:08 am

    Thanks! Good work. See U.

  7. Micheal Byrd Says:
    February 15th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

    Hey Garry I was just wondering if when you install Mythtv the way you did when you boot up do you have to options ubuntu and mythtv. Also is it easy to take the files that you record off mythtv when you are useing ubuntu?

  8. Garry Says:
    February 15th, 2007 at 3:17 pm

    The way I do it, when you boot up you can log in as the mythtv user and run the mythfrontend command to access MythTV features. This runs on top of the standard Gnome window manager so that you can also run all the usual Ubuntu applications and ALT-TAB between them.

    The files that MythTV records are saved into a directory on your disk, so are accessible to anybody using the PC who has permission to read them.

  9. Micheal Byrd Says:
    February 15th, 2007 at 4:35 pm

    thanks I am going to try to set this up tonight.

  10. Micheal Byrd Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 8:27 pm

    hey man I tried to install according to your instructions but it could not find mythtv. any ideas?

  11. Garry Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 10:11 pm

    I’m not sure what you mean by “could not find mythtv”. Could you please give me some more information?

    Thanks.

  12. Micheal Byrd Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    root@linuxbox:~# sudo apt-get install mythtv mythtv-themes
    Reading package lists… Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information… Done
    Package mythtv-themes is not available, but is referred to by another package.
    This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
    is only available from another source
    E: Package mythtv-themes has no installation candidate
    root@linuxbox:~#

    if you need more let me know thanks MJB

  13. Garry Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 10:48 pm

    Thanks,

    Please post your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

  14. Micheal Byrd Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

    i am sorry i am kind of new to linux how do i get this?

  15. Garry Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 11:01 pm

    Run up a terminal “Applications->Accessories->Terminal”

    Type the command:

    cat /etc/apt/sources.list

    Then highlight the text with the mouse to select it and paste it into your browser with the middle mouse button.

  16. Micheal Byrd Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 11:07 pm

    it wont let me leave something that large do you have an email or should i just break it up

  17. Garry Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 11:09 pm

    You can email it to me if you like. My address is on the following page:

    http://parker1.co.uk/contact.php

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