[mythtv-users] HDHR Prime queries

[James Miller]

Something sort of strange happened recently. I was trying to sell my 
nearly brand new HDHR4-2US on the local craigslist and some guy responded 
wanting to trade something for it rather than to buy it: he offered to 
trade me an HDHR Prime (he was cord-cutting) for it. After some 
consideration and research, I agreed to the trade.

I don't have an immediate need for the HDHR Prime. But whenever my analog 
cable disappears--which is said to be imminent--I may. At that point, 
we'll have to discuss whether we'd be willing to pay the cable company 
about $30 a year to rent their M-card, or whether we'll just restrict 
ourselves to free OTA programming at that point.

Until it's time to make that decision, I plan to just sort of fiddle 
around with the HDHR Prime to learn how it works and what it can do. Of 
course I'll need to rent the M-card for a month to do anything other than 
clear QAM with it, which I'm prepared to do in order to do some testing. 
But, during this initial testing phase I don't want to incorporate this 
tuner into MythTV's database alongside my other tuners (K-World USB stick 
for OTA and two HVR-1950's for analog cable). Since it will only be 
present episodically at first, I don't want to mess with my channel 
line-up and have to add and delete it in the backend.

So what I'm hoping I might do is test out some recordings from the command 
line. I know there's a CLI utility for interfacing with the HDHR Prime and 
I've done a couple of channel scans with it. I believe I've read that 
recordings can be made using this utility as well--is that correct? What 
would be great for this initial, testing phase, would be some script like 
the one for dvb tuners that's included in this Gentoo wiki article 
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/TV_Tuner and that, using mencoder, dumps the 
dvb tuner's output, for a specified interval, to a file (a similar but 
much more complex and capable script that uses dd can be found at 
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/files/bin/record-dvb.sh). With something of 
that sort, a cron job could be set up to do some test recordings with the 
HDHR Prime. So, would it be possible to create a command line script such 
as that for the HDHR Prime? Or is there maybe something along these lines 
already in existence?

Finally, I'll just ask for confirmation on whether the impression that 
I've gotten that it can be sort of a headache to get the HDHR 
Prime-with-M-card set up and working under MythTV is correct. I seem to 
recall reading accounts of long telephone sessions with cable company tech 
support before things were finally gotten to work. Can anyone confirm 
either a smooth or difficult process of getting this tuner with M-card 
operational on a MythTV system?

Thanks in advance for any input.