I have an Asus M3A-H/HDMI Mobo, running 4Gb of Corsair and an AMD Athlon-64-X2 6000+ (3.1GHz). It also has a pair of Samsung SpinPoint hard drives each of 640 GB, and an LG Blu-Ray Reader. I bought the Mobo because it has three PCI slots to carry my existing TV cards and wireless LAN card, and because it also has full HD/HDMI capability (or so the specification states).

It's over-powered for just mythTV, but after I get that running on it, I want to run all the stuff presently running on my existing server (mail server, firewall, squid, dansguardian, virus checker, etc., etc.) and leave it running 24x7, so I over-configured a bit.

I have loaded Ubuntu 8.10 (tried both 64 and 32-bit variants with similar results)which installed faultlessly. I then loaded (through synaptic) MythTV (front and backend) and did the setups.

If I run with the Open Source Ubuntu video drivers as loaded by the system installation process, I get frames dropped and as a result, the video gives the impression of strobing. However, this is not the biggest problem....The Mobo has an on-board ATI Radeon HD 3200 on-board video, so I load the proprietary driver, which goes on faultlessly. However, this is where it gets silly!

With the proprietary driver loaded, MythTV shows two "copies" of the screen, one above the other. I've tried this a couple of times with both 64 and 32-bit OSes, and it happens every time, with both the VGA and the HDMI interface.

I'm writing this as I (once again) load the OS, but there is one other thing I need help with (only one??)...when I look at the xorg.conf file, all I see is:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Wassat???Configured WHERE???? what has happened here, I normally set up all the video stuff in here, but if I try to alter this file, I get all kinds of errors and have to revert to the backup, so where has the "guts" of xorg.conf gone to??

Any help gratefully accepted

I have only had success with NVidia cards + Mythtv.
sorry!

Well, Google was again my Friend! I eventually found

http://davmac.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/ati-driver-woes/

which, among other things, says:

"You need to change your playback profiles to use the “one field” filter or no filter.

In myth, “Utilities/Setup” -> “Setup” -> “TV Settings” -> “Playback”

hit “Next” a couple of times until you get to the “Playback profiles” screen

Edit each applicable profile, press “Next” on the screen that appears initially, and set the “Primary de-interlacer” to either “none” or “one field”. Set the “Fallback de-interlacer” to “none”. Remember to hit “finish” when done."

When I did that, it all worked properly

Well, I guess perseverence pays off!