[mythtv-users] Good tuner card?

[Greg Woods]

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 15:53 -0500, Dewey Smolka wrote:
> There are an awful lot of postings on the list, mostly from new users,
> about live TV. The fact is that Myth can do live TV, but it is not
> really what Myth is for, and once you begin to use it, you'll find
> live TV less and less relevant -- it's useful to ensure that the card
> works, but you don't actually watch TV with it.

I can find one reason to watch live TV with it: PIP. Not many shows will
lend themselves to watching more than one thing at a time, but one thing
does: sporting events. People are likely to think I'm slightly insane
for this, but last Saturday I actually had four football games on at the
same time; one on a frontend-only laptop, one in the TV's PIP screen,
one in Myth's PIP screen, and one on the main screen. While it is indeed
impossible to really follow all the details of what is happening in all
four games at once, it is possible to keep track of the basic flow of
all the games, and pay attention to a particular one when there's a key
play. PIP does not seem to work while watching a recording, it only
works in Live TV mode, so that's one use for Live TV mode.

> There are quite a number of
> 500 users, but it seems like there's a lot of postings about problems
> getting both tuners to work simultaneously.

It's a bit tricky to do the initial install. I ended up creating an ivtv
startup script that I could put in /etc/rc.d/init.d (FC3) just to get
the proper ivtvctl commands run automatically at every reboot. I think
this is mostly because the ivtv drivers are still under development and
are not fully mature.

>  getting the PVR 500 to work on both tuners begs the
> question of how much you know about Linux, and how much effort you're
> willing to put into getting the card to work.

That's a fair statement.

> 
> >From what I understand, the PVR 500 works well with the new ivtv
> drivers, but the card will show up as two separate PVR 150s --
> /dev/video0 and /dev/video1. Inside mythtv-setup, you need to specify
> the capture sources as tuner0 on each rather than tuner0 and tuner1 on
> /dev/video0.

Even though this has been covered here many times, it continues to
confuse Myth newbies. And that's understandable; why would it show two
tuners on two cards, when there is really one card with two tuners? Goes
back to the "under development" ivtv drivers. But those immature drivers
do work quite well once you get them set up properly.

>  I also understaqnd that there are issues getting audio to
> work on both tuners. 

Same thing again. My ivtv startup script runs the necessary ivtvctl
commands to make this work.

In my case, the 500 was a godsend, because my computer room is at the
end of a long coax run from the cable outlet in the living room, and I
could never get a splitter in the computer room to work; it always
degraded the signal to intolerable levels. The 500 was the only way I
could get more than one tuner in my master backend.

--Greg