It seems I've hit a few problems with my HTPC project that are quite annoying.

MythTV will not tune to a channel in "live TV" mode - only when recording. So it's impossible to view a channel without first programming the current show to be recorded. I'm sure this is a local config problem rather than a general error in MythTV, but it does point out a couple of annoying UI problems.

My DVB card or its driver apparently randomly decides to not receive data once in a while. Over the weekend, it meant that none of the scheduled recordings actually happened. Argh...

And finally, I can not make suspend/resume of the system work. First of all, MythTV does not seem to run the halt command (although it does warn that it will), and secondly, even if it did, the ASUS BIOS does not in fact resume the computer at the time programmed to the BIOS, regardless of whether I do this with the 'nvram-wakeup' program or via the BIOS screen.

For some reason, MythTV will lock up X in a way in which the only cure is a full reset of the computer when trying to view a DVD. Funnily enough, this is not a complete system crash, as background processes are still running and it is possible to cleanly shut down the computer (I've programmed the power button to do a 'shutdown -h'), but the console will not respond to anything. Perhaps this is an NVIDIA related issue, as I can't seem to make the XvMC video acceleration work reliably either.

Comment by oa on Tue, 07 Dec 2004 23:31:20:
Hmm. Today, viewing live tv suddenly works, at least most of the time. I believe this has something to do with mythbackend not acting very intelligently when the DVB card does not pass through a proper channel stream, as wuold happen if a channel you're trying to tune into is not transmitting. The DVD problem turned out to be a lightly documented, but apparently fairly well known "feature" of MPlayer not supporting DVD playback very well, in particular wrt DVD menus. Switching MythTV's configuration to use Xine instead fixed that issue.