PVR status

So, the Linux/PVR box that I built is having problems with the kernel panicking, the audio not sounding to great (it is a little tinny), and the remote still not working in MythTV. But having a PVR has totally changed my life (well, maybe I'm exaggerating). But still, I'm watching way more TV than I have been -- but it is a better, more concentrated form of TV. I managed to snag the Star Wars documentary "Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy" on A&E for example -- something that I never would have sat down and watched without a PVR.

That being said, however, this crashing thing needs to stop. I suspect that it is something wrong with the driver for the capture card (the 'ivtv' driver) -- possibly that it is not SMP-safe. I'm having a hard time getting the error message when the box crashes, however, because when it goes down, it goes down hard. And I don't have a text console on the thing that I can just read the error message from. So, I'm going to investigate the netconsole feature of Linux, to see if that will help me capture the error.

I think though, that there is only so much debugging that I am going to be interested in doing before I just break down and buy a Tivo. This one from pioneer is really tempting, if it weren't $800 freakin' dollars...!

-Andy.