[mythtv-users] MythTV build story, part III

Richard Krehbiel richard.krehbiel at gmail.com
Thu Sep 21 13:06:55 UTC 2006


(This is taking me a long time, because I get to do bits and pieces when
time permits.  I hope to be working in time to capture the pilot for
"Heroes" in HD.  Heh - maybe.)

I have two pcHDTV HD-3000 cards.  I intend to hook both to my Comcast wire
and use QAM and cable-NTSC, but I don't have the coax distribution connector
yet so last night I unhooked by set-top box and connected one pcHDTV card.
I knew Linux had detected both  cards (thank goodness - I had hacked one
card to fit a blocked PCI slot - it still worked).

Sadly, I had no luck channel-scanning.  I had downloaded the firmware and
copied it to the directory that the pcHDTV web page indicates, which was
/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware.  I got impatient - dvbscan (from the
pcHDTV.comweb site) was taking too long - so I modified
dvbscan.c, and lowered the repeat counts and shortened the timeouts (and
changed one empty for() loop to a usleep - how silly).  When it finished and
had detected no channels, I put the original super-slow code back and went
again.  When it finished hours later, I still had no channels detected.

Then I downloaded tools from linuxtv.com and tried it's channel scanner.
It's faster and more verbose, and it also found nothing.  Oh great.

Finally I thought to look at /var/log/messages, and found lots of complaints
about flash files missing from /lib/firmware.  Ah.  I copied the files from
/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware, and started seeing firmware loading success.
(Note: the firmware's loaded each time the device is opened, the firmware
load process hangs the computer for a few seconds, and dvbscan reopens the
device for each channel scanned.  How annoying.)

I re-ran the linuxtv scan tool (it's faster) and it found the Comcast HD
channels.  Yay!

Can I ask for a clarification?  Comcast is mostly analog, with some
digital.  I've detected the digital channels.  Can I just get confirmation
that my HD-3000 cards will tune both the NTSC and the QAM channels?  I
recall reading about there being some issue with doing both.   I know it
can't do both simultaneously - there's just one tuner.  But I need one card
to be able to record a QAM digital program, then when that program ends, go
tune an analog program next.  S'okay?

Coming soon: how I got an old MyHD IR receiver configured for LIRC and
working with my Harmony 680 remote.  Er - once I figure it out, that is.
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