For the longest time I thought it was the ~x86 ivtv or nvidia drivers I was running that were having some weird draw error. I come to find out that it was because a while ago I added "autostart" to my USE flags. The autostart system is awesome, but when I go to the "guide" from live TV, the screen flickers for a second, and no guide shows. I hit exit (ESC) and the screen goes black, and I have to restart mythfrontend. I finally got around to looking in my mythfrontend.log and found that there was some X drawing or resource error (sorry I don't have the exact text). Switched to blackbox + auto-hide slit and it works just fine. I think it has something to do with the fact that the program guide appears to be some sort of weird window in top of the liveTV window (fullscreen). What do you expect from something called evilWM? :) I'd suggest either switching to a WM that handles this window weirdness more gracefully or configuring evilwm so that it doesn't freak out. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start mythtv in evilwm (as from "autostart" USE flag setting) 2. Press M(enu) and select Program Guide 3. Hit Esc Actual Results: Blank screen Expected Results: The Program Guide to show up [ebuild R ] media-tv/mythtv-0.20.1_p13344 USE="alsa autostart dvd ivtv joystick lirc mmx opengl perl vorbis (-altivec) -backendonly -crciprec -dbox2 -debug -dts -dvb -freebox -frontendonly -hdhomerun -ieee1394 -jack -lcd -xvmc" VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia -i810 -via" 12,140 kB
This works just fine for me.
I'm not running this version (running mythtv-0.21_pre15014), but I am using USE="autostart" and also use the nvidia driver, and don't have any problems with the the guide or black screens. Maybe try playing with the OpenGL overlay setting (in 'Appearance') or other similar settings? I get sporadic freezing watching live TV / recordings if I turn on OpenGL VSync.
No one in #gentoo-mythtv can reproduce this. USE="autostart" doesn't change the way MythTV is built. It just pulls in a few extra depends so that its possible to setup an easy autostart mechanism. My only guess is you're hitting an old xinit bug that would switch to a dead VT instead of the VT that X was running on. Going to need you to do the legwork here and try to debug this issue and reopen if you've got more details that we can work with.
