[Sussex] Fwd: MythTV & getting it to work

[Steven Dobson]

Dominic

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 02:47 -0600, linux at oneandoneis2.org wrote:
> I know a few people have got working Myth boxes, so I'm hoping
> somebody can offer some advice.

FWIW here's mine.

> We've been trying to get Myth working on & off for a few months. We've
> got two Hauppauge PCI cards - a simple WinTV analogue card, and an
> analgue+digital HVR one that only became supported with kernel 2.6.16
> 
> The problem is, whilst we can get myth installed just fine, and the
> hardware appears to be recognised & in working order, Myth never
> actually finds any channels or allows us to watch any TV.
> 
> Much as I hate to confess to distro-hopping in hopes of one "just
> working", we've tried Gentoo, Ubuntu & KnoppMyth. Oh, and Knoppix 5.01
> just on the off-chance.
> 
> We've done kernel upgrades and all sorts: lspci and dmesg make it
> clear that the cards are detected & recognised and the drivers are
> there & working. But the only way we've managed to actually get a TV
> picture out of them was to install Windows XP and use the Hauppauge
> software, and we both *refuse* to accept that as an option :o)

I assume at this point that you have a working driver.  That you run
some test ("cat /dev/dsp0 | mplayer -" or something simular) to see
if you get a picture (even if it is noise).

> So: We've got hardware that demonstrably works, and that is supported
> under Linux, verified by dmesg telling us they're there & the drivers
> are installed. And yet Myth still can't seem to do anything with them.
> Are we missing something blindingly obvious?

You don't say which of the many Hauppauge cards your using, but for my
PVR350 (which has an MPEG2 encoder and a decoder) I had to use some
utility programs to configure the card.  My PVR has been down for a
while so I'm having to do this from memory, by the command so somthing
like ivtvctrl which had loads of options.  This was on on the IvTV
driver so if you're not using that I guess this is of no help.

Steve