[mythtv-users] announce: script for locating QAM channels

[Peter Watkins]

Brian Wood wrote:
> On Mar 4, 2006, at 11:08 PM, Mike wrote:
> 
> 
>>Brian Wood wrote:

>>>You say you have "signal strength" problems. "Unwatchably choppy"
>>>might describe what I have seen when using the azap/mplayer method on
>>>the 288 streams that atscscan found on my system.

That would describe my experience, too, with the QAM signals I tried.

>>Just curious, but what motherboard do you have? (more specifically,what
>>south bridge chipset) I had a problem that sounds very similar to yours
>>where my tuner would lock on and off of the channel when I did anything
>>more than capture the stream. (like use mplayer to view it at the same
>>time, or listen to music on the soundcard at the same time)

> I have had the same symptoms with two different motherboards.  
> Originally I tried this with a Via-based K8M8  board with an amd64  
> 3700 CPU, and I have since moved the card to a Dell machine with an  
> Intel 82850-based board with a P4/2.4Ghz. Identical results on both  
> machines.
> 
> Off-air reception of ATSC was perfect on the K8 system, I have not  
> tried it on the P4.

I'm using a Via K8T800-based Athlon64 3200+, running Fedora Core 4
(i386). I've seen other hints that my Antec 350w SmartPower (included
with case) PS might not be up to snuff.[0] So I've got a better 550w PS
(Antec TruePower II, which has two 12 rails) on its way. I'll try that
before I bother with any amplifying signal splitters.

Someone else here asked about power usage -- I'll have to put my
Kill-a-Watt inline with the PC to see what Wattage and VA look like.

-Peter

[0] ...like last night, when frontend was playing an ATSC HDTV stream
[usually ~33% CPU] while the backend daemons were recording ahead on the
ATSC stream, recording an SDTV (Hauppauge PVR-x50 hardware capture), and
running mythcommflag on something or another, and my system
spontaneously rebooted. According to the calculator at
http://extreme.outervision.com/index.jsp, my 350w supply is only about
100w more than I need, which sounds like cutting things a bit close.
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