[mythtv-users] Writing howtos: budget-ci reports wrong frequencies, XML-TV behaves strange

[Per Öberg]

Hi there!

I have just finished installing MythTV 20 and i feel that i have had a
little rougher ride than i was hoping. I have been searching the Wiki
and the homepage for places to share my newly acquired knowledge but i
haven't managed to find where to put the information nor found any
information regarding the problems i have encountered.

Before i start writing a giant howto I am wondering if this information
is out there somewhere:
1) My technotrend budget CI DVB-T card with Philips TDA1004x tuner does
not automatically find the transports during the initial scan. If i
enter as much information i can obtain about my Muxes and select the
"ignore timout" option during scanning of existing transports the
channels are found.

2) During the channel scan my DVB card reports back erroneous
frequencies. This means that during the scan of the existing transport
new transports with other frequencies than the ones i put it shows up.
If i remove my old transports and edit the new ones with the correct
frequencies all is well. However, this is rather hard since the
frequencies reported back by the card does not have any obvious
translating formula. I have the same problem in xavtv4 so i have to
manually edit the config file and then write protect it to stop xavtv
from changing it back. From xawtv and mysql i can then match the
transport id's with the frequencies so that i know what to put in in
mythtv-setup. Not really a piece of cake so to say. I know that this is
something wrong with the driver and not MythTV but it would be great if
the users were prepared. In MythTV 19 the manually entered transport
frequencies did not change when scanning for channels so v20 is a step
back for people with this kind of error.

3) XML-Tv is a hassle to get to function properly. I really didn't get
how it was supposed to go. When i first scanned for channels and then
ran "mythfilldatabase --manual" it either said "SQL error, key already
exists" or something similar or it added a completely new channel. If i
erased all the channels and ran "mythfilldatabase --manual" i was able
to get new channels in the list but somehow i didn't manage to couple
these new channels to the correct transport streams. (This might be due
to the budget ci card frequency problem) The solution was to check the
XML-tv config file and manually cut and paste the XML-id's into
mythtv-setup. Now, i realize that this was probably not necessary but i
really couldn't figure out how this was supposed to be done. I would
rather like to understand this and then write it down for future
reference as well as for other to see. Is this information out there
somewhere.

4) MythTV is constantly nagging on me that either the backend is not
started or it is started during mythtv-setup. I really dont get in which
order i should do things to not get any errors. It really seems like a
catch 22 with the exception that if you ignore the errors and carry out
your operations you will eventually have everything up and running.

Regards
Per Öberg