The Continuing Saga of the MythTv Project.

I am working with Larry Matter on developing a mini distro like Freevix for MythTV.
Larry has put a great deal of work into this, and without his help I would still be trying to figure things out.
I owe him a few beers!

We can boot over the network and watch recorded and Live TV, but I was having connection problems with my M10K. The M9000 (M9K) works with no problems.

After some hair pulling (testing) I found that if a monitor was connected, everything worked fine. I deduced this from many trips running up and down stairs to test on the TV. When upstairs I would get erratic results from no IP or lost communications. I also had power problems from no network lights and the box not turning on. I did everything from running another network cable to trying different power sockets around the house, same results. I could not figure out what was going wrong, when I had the box in my lab it worked flawlessly. I then noticed that if I disconnected the monitor downstairs I could replicate the problem

I mentioned the problems I was having to Larry and he told me about some articles on the Via Arena User Forums where people where having similar networking problems.

Here are the articles…
(credit where credit is due!)
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.cfm?catid=32&threadid=36036&highlight_key=y&keyword1=ground%20
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.cfm?catid=32&threadid=39929&highlight_key=y&keyword1=ground%20

I first tried hooking up a 4700 16V capacitor to the DC in as mentioned in this article.
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.cfm?catid=32&threadid=36368&highlight_key=y&keyword1=capacitor
Here is the picture of what I did.

I also hooked up the ground wire.

This did not help me losing connection with the server, but it did solve the problem with the network card not detecting the link when first turned on.

After trying other test of hooking up a separate ground to the wall and using a regular ATX power supply and having the same results, it dawned on me to check for a BIOS update. So I went to VIA’s site, and with my luck it was down. So I had to wait, not one of my best attributes.

I started looking at the Xbox MythTV distro, but more on that in another article.

Finally the site came back up.
Here is the link for the new BIOS.
http://www.viavpsd.com/product/Download.jsp?motherboardId=81

This has seemed to fix my problems. I think it is a combination of all, all I know is it is working so I can move on to new challenges!!!

Cheers…

Here are some picture of the IR Receiver I built following Larry Matter’s article
Building a Homebrew Infrared Receiver