[mythtv-users] Great experience with MythTV

[George Mari]

I've been using MythTV continuously since October of 2005.  Over the 
years, I've upgraded to newer hardware - drives, memory, tuners, 
motherboards - always successfully, even if it did take a bit of 
fiddling here and there.

Well this past weekend, I had a hardware failure on my 5-port 
PCI-Express (1x) SATA card, and since I couldn't find a direct 
replacement, I had to replace it with a pair of PCI 4-port SATA cards.

This meant that I had to also replace my trusty PC HDTV-5500 PCI ATSC 
tuner card, unfortunately, as I was out of PCI slots.  I also reasoned 
that it would be simpler to replace this tuner than the PVR-350 hooked 
up to my DirecTV receiver, so I went about looking for a nice USB 
digital tuner.

Of course, the first stop was the MythTV wiki, and I quickly found the 
page describing all the different available digital tuners - which ones 
were based on PCI, PCI Express and USB.  After checking the online 
documentation further, along with the stock at my local stores, I 
decided on a USB digital tuner - the Hauppauge HVR-950Q.

So I brought it home, and set aside a few hours thinking I would need to 
"fiddle" with things to get everything working again.  Before I replaced 
the tuner and shut the backend down, I thought I would need to remove 
the tuner from the MythTV configuration in mythtvsetup, but I saw there 
was really no option for this, other than "Remove all tuners" - which I 
didn't want to do.  No problem, I thought, I'll just try it first 
without changing anything in mythtv.  Then if that doesn't work, I can 
just go from there.

So I shutdown the master backend, removed the HDTV-5500 card, added my 
SATA cards, and hooked up the HVR-950Q tuner to an open USB port, and 
attached the antenna cable to it.

I then turned on the machine and logged into the console - it looked 
like the tuner was automatically recognized by the Linux kernel - just 
like the wiki said it would - then I went into mythtvsetup on the 
backend to see where I might need to tell the system that it has a new 
tuner.

Huh.  Well, it looks like mythtvsetup just kind of recognized the new 
tuner, and even linked it up to the same listing source as before.

Well surely, I thought - it can't just be *working*, could it?  I 
decided to try live TV, and sure enough - yes - it did "just work".  All 
OTA channels worked just as before.  I waited later that evening to make 
sure scheduled programs also still worked, and they did also.

Wow - seriously, I was - and am - impressed.  I mean with a Windows 
machine, I would have at least had to stick the driver CD in, but I 
didn't even have to do that!  I literally made no software configuration 
changes for replacing a tuner.

Hats off to the MythTV developers - and also all the guys who write the 
kernel drivers for the different hardware we use - TV tuners, SATA 
cards, IR remotes, etc.  My sincerest thanks and compliments to all of 
you for making my life a little easier than I expected this weekend.