(This is taking me a long time, because I get to do bits and pieces
when time permits. I hope to be working in time to capture the
pilot for "Heroes" in HD. Heh - maybe.)<br>
<br>
I have two pcHDTV HD-3000 cards. I intend to hook both to my
Comcast wire and use QAM and cable-NTSC, but I don't have the coax
distribution connector yet so last night I unhooked by set-top box and
connected one pcHDTV card. I knew Linux had detected both
cards (thank goodness - I had hacked one card to fit a blocked PCI slot
- it still worked).<br>
<br>
Sadly, I had no luck channel-scanning. I had downloaded the
firmware and copied it to the directory that the pcHDTV web page
indicates, which was /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware. I got impatient -
dvbscan (from the pcHDTV.com web site) was taking too long - so I
modified dvbscan.c, and lowered the repeat counts and shortened the
timeouts (and changed one empty for() loop to a usleep - how
silly). When it finished and had detected no channels, I put the
original super-slow code back and went again. When it finished
hours later, I still had no channels detected.<br>
<br>
Then I downloaded tools from <a href="http://linuxtv.com">linuxtv.com</a> and tried it's channel
scanner. It's faster and more verbose, and it also found
nothing. Oh great.<br>
<br>
Finally I thought to look at /var/log/messages, and found lots of
complaints about flash files missing from /lib/firmware.
Ah. I copied the files from /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware, and
started seeing firmware loading success. (Note: the firmware's
loaded each time the device is opened, the firmware load process hangs
the computer for a few seconds, and dvbscan reopens the device for each
channel scanned. How annoying.)<br>
<br>
I re-ran the linuxtv scan tool (it's faster) and it found the Comcast HD channels. Yay!<br>
<br>
Can I ask for a clarification? Comcast is mostly analog, with some
digital. I've detected the digital channels. Can I just get
confirmation that my HD-3000 cards will tune both the NTSC and the QAM
channels? I recall reading about there being some issue with doing
both. I know it can't do both simultaneously - there's just one
tuner. But I need one card to be able to record a QAM digital program,
then when that program ends, go tune an analog program next. S'okay?<br>
<br>
Coming soon: how I got an old MyHD IR receiver configured for LIRC and
working with my Harmony 680 remote. Er - once I figure it out,
that is.<br>
<br>