[mythtv-users] Great experience with MythTV

Devin Heitmueller dheitmueller at kernellabs.com
Wed Mar 30 00:05:09 UTC 2011


On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 8:00 PM, George Mari
<george_mythusers at mari1938.org> wrote:
> 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.

Just watch out if you plan on doing analog with the 950Q.  There is an
outstanding issue related to analog audio capture intermittently
failing.

Regards,

Devin
(the HVR-950Q driver guy)

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com


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