I've had my MythTV box for almost a year now (I love the thing) but I just recently began having trouble with mythfilldatabase. Just in the last few days mythfilldatabase has been returning with an 'Error 500: internal server error' from Zap2It. Has anyone else run into this problem?

Thanks in advance,
jpbarto

not at all. i use it every day.

you should double check that your zap2it subscription didnt expire, they do every ~2 months if you dont renew them. they usually send you an email when its almost up, but if you didnt get it or didnt register iwth your real email it would have expired

Thanks for the response android. I tried many, many things. Sad to say the only thing that seemed to fix it was to create a new account.

I am curious. You have had a working box. I am trying to figure out how to congfigure my sound to work right in mythtv. I use slackware with the alsa drivers and am not sure what to put in for audio out, and mix settings in myth.

I am not at my apartment (where the myth box is) right now, but i will be next week. From what I recall myth has a plethora of confusing menu's and screens. If you give me exactly what program/screen/and options that you are curious about i will let you know what i am running.

FYI: I am running slack 10.0, a soundblaster live card, alsa, myht 0.17.

The sound settings were a bitch to figure out i remmeber, and being lazy i didnt exactly document what i did. Once i got them right they work perfectly tho. It had to do a lot with muting certain alsa channels, but im sure i could help you thru it.

Reply to this for any specific settings you want, this way ill remember to answer you later in the week. alternatively you can email me at android1654@hotmail.com

Well I suck for creating a thread with a horribly non-descriptive subject. But we must move on.

Zonen, I too am not at home, but I will be tonight so please post the list of questions you have. To the best of my memory I (onboard audio w/ alsa) entered '/dev/dsp' as the value for audio out.

ok when you log into mythfrontend, go to utilities/setup. Inside of there your gonna choose the general button. Inside of here your mysql page info pops up, hit next once or twice, til it brings you to where it asks for the audio output, and the mixer: I am using alsa for my sound card so I cant use /dev/dsp for any of that. It seems that ALSA:default works in audio output, but I am still having trouble with finding out what my mixer is gonna be called.

zonen, you're right, I have 'ALSA:default' as well. And then for Mixer device I have '/dev/mixer' and the 'Master' is set for Mixer control. That help?

I am running mine thru alsa with mythtv settings for /dev/dsp.

to get it to work properly i had to disable the internal volume controls, and then do some tweaking with alsamixer channels. my card, the creative sb audigy (not the live card i mentioned earlier), is known to be a pain, so my settings may differ from yours more than I originally had hoped.

you may have read this already elswhere, but its easy to check once you get /dev/dsp set up right by running "aplay /dev/dsp", you should then hear the tv. Basically i think there are several ways to get your sound working with myth, my way of disabling the myth internal controls is just one of them.

I have the sound output line of my analog tv-card (an ati tv-wonder pci) patch directly into the input channel of my sb audigy card. if you can rig a similar raw setup like that it should work thru /dev/dsp one way or another.

hope that sheds some light on the situation. let us know how you do.

hmm unfortunatly dev/mixer will now work for me, says no such device found. I still have not been able to figure out what to put in for that damn mixer spot.

so how do I set up dev/dsp right to work????
I get underrun errors when I run that aplay command.

that is ok. i get underrun errors too, i don't know enough about the /dev/dsp data channel to explain why, but they are not critical. At first i was set up like you, I got underrun errors and no sound. then I played around with my alsamixer settings long enough until i could finally get some sound out of it. the follow is a the value of all the channels when I run alsamixer. I don't expect them to all be the same for you, since you have a different card, but hopefully you can deduce a setup that works for you.



master: 68
tone: muted (off) (you can hit the m key to do this)
bass: 43
treble: 48
3d control switch: muted
3d control sigmatel -depth: 0
pcm: 92
pcm capture: 0
pcm center: 0
pcm front: 100
pcm LFE: 100
PCM Surround: 84
Surround: 81
center: 79
LFE: 0
music: 0
Music Captutre: 32
Line: 100
Line2: 0
Line2 capture: 100
CD: 0
mic: 0
mic capture: 0
mic boost: muted
phone: 48
iec958optical: 0
iec958optical capture: 100
iec958optical raw: muted
pc speaker: 0
aux: muted
aux2: 0
aux2 capture: 0
Analog mix: 0
analog mix capture: 100
audigy analog/digital output jack: muted
audigy cd: 0
audigy cd capture: 100
external amplifier: no value set
front: 100
sigmatel 4-speaker stereo: muted
sigmatel surround phase inversion playback: no value set



now looking back over these values (its been awhile since i had to tweak them) I think i remember what was giving me the problem: first analog/digital out had to be muted for the card to give out any sound. next, and more importantly for myth line1 and line2 have some odd inter-locking properties. when both are up i believe i get a weird feedback effect, when line 1 is up and 2 is down there is no sound. basically if you have equivalent settings to what i just metioned there then play with them until you get what works for you.

if aplay /dev/dsp is giving you the underrun error i believe that indicates there is data being transferred to and exisiting at the data point /dev/dsp, otherwise you'd be getting a different error. so you are on the right track. i think it is just a matter of tweaking the sound settings so that something audible comes out on dsp.

also to note: once you get the sound set up the way you like it i would run:
"alsactl store" from the command line
this way you can type "alsactl restore" if you ever screw it up again.

I wish i could give more direct help, but my setup has come from hours of painful trial and error, so it's hard to say conclusively what will work.
as always let us know how you do!

-Joe

hmm seems like I dont have all those options here is what I see when running amixer
master:
master mono:
headphones:
headphones jack sense:
pcm:
Line:
line jack:
cd:
mic:
Mic boost:
phone:
aux:
externel amplifier:

by the way thanks for all the help thus far I appreciate it. I dont see anything else in there. No analog/digital or anything.

well like i said, playing around with combinations of those in alsamixer is what did it for me. heres a suggestion for you based on my setup:


master: 100
master mono: not sure. try 0 and 100
headphones: not sure. try 0 and 100
headphones jack sense: not sure. try 0 and 100
pcm: ~80
Line: 100
line jack: 100
cd: 0
mic: 0
Mic boost: muted
phone: ~50
aux: muted
externel amplifier: not sure. try 0 and 100 (you may not be able to change this one at all)



don't worry about the help, it takes all of 5 minutes out of my morning. I wouldn't even be running linux if it werent for the help of people on this board.

I am interested in setting up a mythtv box. What hardware specs do you recommend?

Thanks.

Allen