[Gllug] tv tuner with hdmi input

[Justin Perreault]

On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 14:31 +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 12/10/2009 12:34 AM, Justin Perreault wrote:
> >> We have sky+ HD, and the quality of the + box is border line (its the
> > Are you hoping to record the Sky feed or just freeview/freesat?
> Would be nice to record on the mythtv box, from the sky hd feed.

There are a couple of options which will allow this to happen and
searching for mythtv record sky will get you started on various points
of view.

> > By quality are you referring to usability or picture aspects?
> 
> I could have been clearer about that. Quality, to me, for such an 
> appliance box is the overall end user experience. The build quality I am 
> sure is fine, its not broken down yet. But here are times when it will 
> randomly reboot itself ( happened twice last week ). On other occasions 
> I've had it lose timesync and stop recording programs at odd points [ 
> not cool when you miss the last 5 overs of a 20/20 game :( ].

The problem is when live shows run over time they commonly don't update
the tv listings and the automated software can only respond to what it
is given.

I have found Mythtv to be great at dealing with schedule changes
especially as adding more tuners allows more shows to be recorded at
once which keeps scheduling conflicts to a minimum. With sky of course
you end up having to get multiple receivers and contracts to gain some
of this flexibility.

For your situation I would recommend setting a record program to start
before a match by a few minutes and to finish an hour or two afterwards,
though I would have thought that such manual programme recording should
be possible on the box you have now. I jumped straight to Mythtv so have
no experience with STB PVR's but vcr's could do it.

Mythtv allows more customization than you will ever want and includes
the ability to set programs to automatically start and finish recordings
outside of their scheduled time.(You could set all football games that
ever come on to automatically record starting 5 mins be for schedule and
finishing 2 hours after the schedule, though specifying teams and
channels might be worth while.)

For all it's complication and flexibility once set up mythtv is great.
Once set you can just leave it. My wife loves it and it really does
transform how you consume TV.

> There have also been situations where it will keep running, but lose the 
> signal to the TV. This one was hard to work out what was going on - 
> while watching a show, suddently everything would go blank. After a few 
> weeks we replaced it with a Dell 22" monitor I have, and that also had 
> the same black-outs, but came up with a handy 'no-signal' message. Power 
> cycling the sky hd+ box resolved the situation.

You will definitely be able to get more feed back as the logs will
expose what is going on(be sure to limit the log size in some way).

I have found digital signals to have less leeway than analogue. If the
signal drops out you might want to consider a booster set to a low
level. Over boosting will kill the signal.

> So, yes. plenty of 'issues'. Hard to reliably reproduce, so sky 
> engineers seem to think were just mad.

As mentioned by others, a mythtv box might also crash when you are
having signal issues and introducing a mythtv box may compound the
frustrations you get. Though of course as you can actually play with the
system it is possible to find ways around problems. I found that my
system was only dying once every 3-4 months, unless I toyed with it.

If you fancy making a rf power cycling script that uses object
recognition(or sound variance recognition) to watch the signal for you
from a remote machine, then a couple of X10 power switches will let you
cycle your sky box automatically along with your myth box if needed.

I also found that the initial set up is easy and quick but the
customization can take a while. The time investment is worth it however
if you go back to toying with your system after a long time and mess it
up you may not find you have the time to expend to correct it back to
where you were. I have been without my mythtv box for several months and
missed the beginning of the season for several shows.

Hth,
Justin

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