Annoying linux htpc question

Great stuff!

So.. what should I be using for a tuner/encoder card for MythTV TV?

Most people seem to use Hauppauge PVRx50's I think..

speaking of which, i need to harass those bastards. they've been dodging me on my $40 rebate.

Yeah a PVR card is a good start as there's very little cpu overhead as the encoding is all in hardware. I started with a 250, some people use the 350 for TV out but think it's all too much hassle, you might as well get an Nvidia card install the driver, add two lines to your xconfig and get really good TV out. I've now got two DVB-T cards which are much better.

So we have another MythTV user! Once you get used to it, you won't want to go back. I very rarely watch "live" TV anymore. I record and watch later which lets me skip the commercials.

As for cards it's very dependent on where you live and what channels you have.

The PVRx50 cards sound fairly good and take a lot of the load off the CPU. The driver support isn't all the way there it would seem. If you want to pipe the output of your cable TV in, this is probably what I'd use.

Personally I didn't have much luck with normal "software" encoders receiving analogue TV. I found the insides of a PC simply had too much interference for the tuner to work well. Digital TV (DVB in Australia) gets around that problem

Is Canada the same as the US i.e. ATSC for digital TV? There are special ATSC cards which I think work pretty well from what I've read.

In my setup I don't have cable or anything like that. I have two Hauppauge Nova-T DVB cards and they work fine. I use a Geforce4 MX440 as the output via S-Video and it's pretty good. Running an XP2400 CPU is probably a bit overkill. CPU runs at about 25% when playing back. More CPU is good for transcoding if you are trying to save space though.

I'm thinking of using another ultra-low electricity system with a fanless mini-ITX mobo from Via. This means a relatively slow CPU, so hardware encode/decode is desirable.

Also, I don't have nor want cable, satellite, or digital anything. Analogue broadcast television, over the airwaves for me!

Does the external USB PVR-350 work with this setup?

Cheers

As far as I can tell, there's no such thing as a USB PVR350. It's PCI only. The PVR USB2 is hardware encode only.

I'm not sure how good the linux drivers are for the USB tuners either so that's something to look out for.

Are you saving the one PCI slot for something else?

You also might find some difficulties getting the TV-out on the mini-ITX board working correctly (overscan in particular). Generally speaking nVidia cards are the easiest to get going I think.

As I asked before, which ivtv driver are you using? The ones from http://ivtv.no-ip.com are much better IMO. You may need to fiddle about as it still has a lot of "personality". Also check the firmware version you're loading.

It ran for a week or so before I witnessed the first lock. After that MTBF got less and less until it got to the point where less than a minute in the machine would lock. No network connectivity, no response to keypresses, you couldn't even toggle the caps lock led on the keyboard. I tried all sorts of stuff both in the kernel and in BIOS. The syslog didn't throw any light on things either. The lock didn't coincide with any channel change actions, in fact I use it mostly for watching recordings, I hardly ever watch live TV on it.

EDIT: On re-reading your post, I only used the PVR card for about a month before getting rid. All my recent problems have been with recordings from DVB cards, although they weren't at fault. It does seem they don't like the BBC's channels on Freeview, seeking to frames is erratic and innacurate.

I tried the noapic flag but alas it didn't do anything for me. TV out with my Nvidia card was simple. In fact all i've done this time is emerge nvidia-kernel, i've not even touched my xorg.conf and I still got TV out!

I have a similar problem with a SLES9 box I was building as a server replacement. In the end, after masses of fruitless searching and replacing, I finally replaced the power supply.
Problem fixed.
To be honest the reason I replaced the power supply was the funny smells that were starting to eminate from it
It really did cure the hard lockups though.

The box itself had a rather chunky and expensive silent PSU in it so I'd have been rather upset if it had been that. The motherboard change did seem to do the trick.

Although I've spent the afternoon reconfiguring my aerial feeds to play musical myth boxes. Thanks to Cris for helping me with drilling and running of new cables. I've now moved the Hovercraft to my study to act as a recording backend now with a regular (noisy) PSU. I've now got a discless box with the silent PSU in the living room acting as the frontend.