[mythtv-users] Good tuner card?

[Steve Adeff]

On Friday 04 November 2005 00:20, Greg Woods wrote:
> 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

the talk of PIP on HDTV a while got me thinking about this. How cool would it 
be to be able to have, say 4 channels showing at once? Imagine being able to 
watch 4 games at once?! It would be great, especially if you've got an HDTV 
and show 4 SD feeds on it.

wow....

Steve