[mythtv-users] Most tuners in a single machine

[Greg Woods]

On Fri, 2006-03-03 at 13:14 -0500, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>  In my case, even a signal amplifier didn't help; I still
> > couldn't split the signal without getting too much degradation.

> Did you connect the amp at the source (i.e. antenna or cable company's 
> feed) instead of the destination (i.e. where you would be amplifying the 
> noise rather than signal)?

In my case, the answer is "halfway in between". There is a splitter
outside the house right where the Comcast feed comes in, but I can't put
a signal amplifier out there because it is exposed to the weather. The
splitter connections are sealed, but the signal amp requires power which
makes it problematical in bad weather. To move this splitter somewhere
else would require completely redoing all the cable wiring, a
time-consuming and/or expensive project. I found other, easier ways to
get around the problem (like converting the front end into a slave
backend so I can put tuner cards there too).

Inside the house, the signal amp is located right at the wall plug,
which is as far upstream as I can get it. Unfortunately, the wall plug
is in the wrong room, so there is a long 25' run from the wall plug to
the computer room. This too might be mitigated if I moved the wall plug
to the correct room to lessen the length of the final cable run, but
that requires ripping out walls etc., another time-consuming and/or
expensive project.

All I am saying is be wary of just buying a bunch of tuner cards and
assuming you will be able to split the signal that many times and still
get good results. Maybe you can, but maybe not. It depends on a lot of
factors that may or may not realistically be under your control.

Since splitters and short lengths of cable are a lot cheaper than tuner
cards, one could try splitting the signal first and making sure it still
works before investing the money in additional tuner cards.

What is weird about my setup is that the run from the outdoor splitter
to the basement is probably as long or longer than the run from the
outdoor splitter to the living room, and yet I can put a three-way
splitter down in the basement and the PVR-150 in the slave backend down
there works fine, but putting a two-way splitter in the computer room
causes too much degradation for either a PVR-500 or an HD-3000. It's not
always obvious when excessive degradation is going to happen.

My long-term plan is to build a new, dedicated, HD-capable FE/MBE
machine and locate it in the basement (then I can get rid of the crappy
Comcast DVR as well which is only there because my Myth frontend is not
HD-capable). This will also allow me to remove the outdoor splitter, as
the signal can be sent around the house over the IP network instead of
cable wires, and I can move the current SBE/FE to the living room
(converting it to FE-only) and I won't need the cable outlet there any
more. The current master backend runs on a machine that is also my
primary desktop. It's got plenty of horsepower, but there are things I'd
like to do with my primary desktop that I can't do as long as it is the
Myth MBE (like occasionally boot into Windows to play games, try out new
Linux distributions, apply updates without worrying about breaking Myth,
etc.).

But that's what we love about open source projects, right? Constant
tinkering :-)

--Greg