[mythtv-users] minimum specs for PCHDTV-5500?

[Andy Wettstein]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:45:29PM -0400, Daniel Kristjansson wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 11:24 -0400, Mary Strimel wrote:
> 
> > My problem is indeed the blocks random of colors in the middle of the
> > screen that cover the picture, plus pausing and hesitating.  It does
> > not happen when playing the signal through my cable box, so I assumed
> > it's not a signal problem, BUT ... my cable provider did tell me at
> > one point that my signal was "less than perfect" so ... is it possible
> > that the HDTV-5500 requires a better signal than what the cable box
> > does?  
> 
> This sounds like a reception problem. It's quite possible that the cable
> box has stronger reception than the HD-5500. It could also be a faulty
> cable or splitter.

I'll second that, idea. I had some reception problems with certain HDTV
channels until I bought a better splitter and shortened the cables up.

You can use the DVB utils to check the errors you are getting.  You'll
need to scan for channels using the scan tool.  You'll probably also
need to stop mythbackend to free up the device.  I did it like this
on debian using QAM:
scan -A 2 -U /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/atsc/us-Cable-Standard-center-frequencies-QAM256

You'll need to save the channels it found to ~/.azap/channels.conf.

Then you can run 'azap channel' (hopefully you got meaningful channel
names from the scan), which will just tune the channel and
output some statistics.  The 'ber' output from that is the most useful.  
It means bit error rate.  It should be practically zero.  You probably
want to check several channels.

There is some more information about the DVB utils here:
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Zap