[mythtv-users] Anyone have HD3000 analog & digital, working on 2.6.19?

gchris gchris at bellsouth.net
Wed Mar 14 00:51:40 UTC 2007


On Monday 12 March 2007 11:05, Rod Smith wrote:

>> System Status - Tuners, you see Tuners 1,3 &5 not recording. No mention
>> of 2 or 4.
> 
> That's normal; each HD3000 card counts as one tuner, at least as far as the
> mythfrontend system status page goes. (It seems to allocate two numbers,
> though, one of which is hidden, so the missing tuner numbers 2 and 4 are
> normal.)
> 
I had a mental block that kept me thinking of this as two tuners but 1 
is really 1 and 1a with 1a being invisble.  Well, it is Mythtv so why 
can't we have phantom tuners? ;)

> Incidentally, given your setup (two HD3000s and a Hauppauge PVR-350), you
> might want to re-do your setup and do the PVR-350 first. That'll make the
> PVR-350 tuner 1, and the HD3000s tuners 2 and 4. The reason for doing this is
> that, given equal priority numbers, MythTV seems to favor lower-numbered
> tuners. For recording analog stations, your PVR-350 is most likely the
> preferred tuner, since it imposes little CPU load. For analog recording, the
> HD3000 acts as a simple frame grabber, so it chews up a lot of CPU time.
> Alternatively, you could boost the PVR-350's TV input priority (in
> mythtv-setup), but this will have the (probably undesired) side effect of
> bumping recordings to later time slots rather than recording two things
> simultaneously. If you re-do the setup as I suggest, you can always give HD
> stations a boost in any of various ways, if you prefer HD recordings to SD
> ones.
> 
If I was really, really going to use HD3000 analog tuners, your 
suggestion would make a lot of sense.  In reality, I'm just doing a 
"proof of concept test" to make sure everything works for a new distro. 
  I've got excellent OTA HDTV coverage in my area so ordinarily I want 
to use the HD tuners first with the PVR as backup and the analog tuners 
on the HD3000s don't even get setup, much less used.

>> And if you go to Watch TV and step thru the cards with the
>> "y" key, you only see the two digital and the PVR come up.
> 
> Try doing as I suggested above: Explicitly schedule a recording on one of the
> HD3000's analog tuners. (If they're not labelled with names that distinguish
> them properly, just try doing two simultaneous recordings from analog-only
> stations. That'll guarantee you get at least one analog recording from an
> HD3000 card.) As I said in my earlier post, MythTV favors the digital tuner
> when you first begin using a card, so when you start up live TV, you'll see a
> digital station come up. You should be able to then tune to an analog
> station, but you won't have an easy way to verify that you're still using the
> HD3000 when you do that. (You could verify it via a second frontend or via
> MythWeb.) When you schedule two analog recordings, you can be sure that at
> least one of them is via the HD3000.
> 
That mental block had me thinking I should see an analog tuner when I 
hit the "y' key.  Not so, all you have to do is browse the channels and 
you'll see (in my case) 5, 5_1, 11,11_1 etc. show up in the OSD.  And 
trust me, I didn't have any trouble at all distinguishing between the 
lousy analog tuner and the super sharp digital ones.  The root cause of 
my problem was that I forgot or didn't know that you have to do "Fetch 
channels from listing source" for each and every analog tuner, unlike 
the DVB tuners where one scan does it for all tuners.

> In other words, I believe your system is set up and working correctly; the
> MythTV interface has just confused you. ;-) (That's nothing to be ashamed of;
> I found configuring my HD3000 card terribly confusing. Sadly, my OTA
> reception sucks and the HD3000's QAM reception is a joke, so I'm using mine
> as nothing but an NTSC framegrabber. I think I'll eventually get an AVerMedia
> A180 or HDHomerun, but not just yet....)

Rod, I'm way too old to be embarrassed at my mistakes.  You know you've 
reached the golden age when you can make a mistake, plead senility or 
mad cow disease and people aren't really sure if you're serious :)  The 
HD3000 is pretty complex and the Mythtv folks didn't help with their 
phantom tuners, but once you've succeeded with one and know exactly what 
to expect from it, it gets a lot easier.  My OTA reception is so good 
that I couldn't stand watching it on a 19" monitor and had to spring for 
a new 42" Panasonic Plasma set when Newegg put them on sale last week. I 
wish I had another ATSC card too because I've got about 10 OTA ATSC 
channels locally but they all have NTSC counterparts which the PVR card 
can handle for now.  What I am wondering about is what to do about 
satellite/cable, or are we going to have some kind of hi-speed internet 
option?

Thanks for helping me get my head straight,
Chris


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