If you can't even see the user interface and get a black screen as soon as the boot sequence completes THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT PAGE. You want the BlackScreenAfterInstall page instead. This page IS applicable if you are only seeing "a black screen" or "snow" or "gray fuzz" or you fail back to the menu when you try to watch Live TV. You may also have been referred here for the configuration walk through.

About 99 times out of 100 the problem here is that your tuner card isn't tuning. There are a whole variety of possible reasons for this.

Please note that there is no shortcut here other than going through this check list. Go through the whole list. Follow the links. Read the logfiles where indicated. You're going to feel really dumb if the step you skipped turns out to be the source of your problem 2 or 3 weeks from now. Also note that you may have more than one thing wrong, don't stop reading after the first thing that matches and assume that's the whole story.

• Physical cable and connection problems - Please see the PictureQualityIssues page for an extensive list of things to check.
• Misconfiguration during setup - Please see the GettingBackIntoMytTVsetup page and then check the rest of these sub-points there.
  • Under "1. General" (3rd page) make sure you have the right frequency set selected. For North American users connecting via the tuner input, go through the following settings:
    • If (and only if) you are connected to a real antenna chose us-bcast.
    • If you are connected directly to the cable (no cable box) and all the channels are bad (snow/fuzz/black/quits/...) with the possible exception of channels 5 & 6 you need the opposite of us-cable/us-cable-hrc from what you currently have.
    • If you are connected directly to the cable (no cable box) and most of the channels are OK but 5 & 6 are bad, you need the opposite of us-cable/us-cable-irc from what you currently have.
    • If you are connected via a cable or satellite box chose us-cable, however, you will need to do your tuning using an "external tuner script".
  • Under "2. Capture Cards", make sure you have your capture card defined correctly.
    • If you have a PVR card (Hauppauge PVR-150, PVR-250, PVR-350, PVR-500 or equivalent) select "MPEG-2 Encoder", your first card will be /dev/video0, the next one /dev/video1, and so on. If the page reports an error scanning your card then see the section about unknown/unrecognized tuner type below.
    • If you have a YUV/BTTV/frame grabber/Software encoder/... type card, select "Analog V4L". Your first card will be /dev/video0, the next one /dev/video1, ... Again, the card and tuner type should be recognized by the scanning, but there are cases where it gets it wrong.
    • If you have a DVB or ATSC capture card (pcHDTV HD3000, HD5000, HD5500, KWorld ATSC-110, ...) chose DVB DTV. Do not chose pcHDTV V4L, as the DVB option is far better supported.
    • Chose the default connection type appropriate for your input. If you're connecting via coax use the lowest numbered Tuner or Television input, for S-Video use the lowest numbered S-Video input, for Composite (yellow RCA phono jack) use the lowest numbered Composite input.
    • Note that in mixed installs /dev/video0, /dev/video1, ... will correspond to the card that the is detected first in the logs. You may end up with a YUV car as /dev/video0, and a PVR card as /dev/video1. CheckingLogFiles is the only way to be sure!
  • Under "3. Video Source" make sure you have a channel lineup and program guide feed configured. North American users, please see the KnoppMythInstall page for how to setup a feed from the SchedulesDirect non-profit service. Note - If you have a downloadable program guide like this you should not scan for SDTV channels since it will only screw things up.
  • Under "4. Input Connections" make sure that you have associated the right "Video Source" with the right input and only that input. Do not associate all of the inputs from a card with the same "Video Source" or the software will not know which one to choose for any given channel. It is OK to associate inputs from multiple different cards (the PVR-500 is treated as two cards) with the same video source.
    • if you have a downloadable channel lineup and program guide like SchedulesDirect, DO NOT scan for SDTV channels. Doing so will corrupted the lineup information, and you will neeed to drop all of your "Video Sources" then recreate them and your "Input Connections".
    • If you are connecting an antenna or raw cable (no box) via coax use the lowest numbered Tuner input for the card.
    • If you are connecting a cable or satellite box via S-Video use the lowest numbered S-Video input. You will need to specify an "External Channel Change Command" to handle tuning the box.
    • If you are connecting a cable or satellite box via Composite (yellow RCA phono jack) use the lowest numbered Composite input. You will need to specify an "External Channel Change Command" to handle tuning the box.
    • If you are connecting a cable or satellite box via coax (screw on cable connector) use the lowest numbered Tuner input. You will need to specify an "External Channel Change Command" to handle tuning the box. You will also need to specify the "Preset tuner to channel" value to match the channel the box is rebroadcasting the signal on.
    • DO NOT associate all the inputs for your card(s) with the same "Video Source" or the software will not know which input to choose for a given channel.
  • Under "5. Channel Editor", if you have a downloadable channel lineup and program guide like SchedulesDirect, DO NOT scan for SDTV channels. Doing so will corrupted the lineup information, and you will neeed to drop all of your "Video Sources" then recreate them and your "Input Connections".
• PVR/IVTV tuner type is unrecognized by the drivers - see the CheckingLogFiles page for how to detect this. This is currently the most common problem with PVR-150 cards. PLEASE NOTE that "tuner type 4" is not a real valid type, and indicates that your tuner is unrecognized.
  • If the logs indicate an unkown tuner type, "tuner type not set", or tuner type 4 - see the CompileIvtv pages for instruction on upgrading your driver (it's easy).
  • If this doesn't work and your PVR tuner model is identified in the tveeprom information as TCL M2523_5N_E, TCL M2523_3DB_E or Philips FM1216ME MK5 see the bottom of the TVCaptureCards page for the diagnostics and possible fix there. Upgrading to the latest IVTV drivers for your kernel is still recommended.
• YUV/BTTV/Analog capture card tuner type is misidentified. You will need to research your card type and model for the correct setting.
• Tuner type is "recognized" as "type 4", this is not a real type. This indicates that the IVTV or BTTV V4L drivers think that your tuner chip is unsupported or blacklisted.
  • See the CheckingLogFiles page for details of how to diagnose this.
  • Upgrade your drivers to the latest version for your kernel.
  • Finally, see the bottom of the TVCaptureCards page for details on forcing a valid tuner type for certain misidentified tuners.
• Bad interaction between multiple tuner cards - see the CheckingLogFiles page.
• You may have to fine tune the freqid for channels 4 & 5. This can easily be accomplished with mythweb. Be sure you that you have selected the correct frequency set before starting this.
  • Log into mythweb from another computer
  • Go to the settings page
  • Pick MythTV channel info
  • You will see a table with the channels. Add a value to the finetune column, then hit save. The numbers are in hz. Change from the bad channel on your frontend to another channel, then back to your bad channel to see the change.
  • I ended up using a bisection method to find my frequency. I upped it by 3000 and turned my channel from black and white to total fuzz. I then used half of that (1500). Luckily this one tuned with good sound and in color. I settled on 2000. These is the value I used, but yours will most likely be different.

Please search for information related to your tuner card for more details.

In very rare cases your X server may not have Xv support for some reason. See the CheckingLogFiles page. Unless you see an error message to that effect in your X log file it's almost certainly not your problem.

If you have a PVR-350 card which you are using for your TV output and see a large black box covering 90-95% of the centrer of the screen, see this entry on the IVTV wiki - http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Troubleshooting#PVR-350_TV-OUT_with_kernel_2.6.19_and_up