[mythtv-users] Simultaneous recordings fail spectacularly---why? [part 1]

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

So does anyone---anyone at all---have -any- clues for me on why trying
to record from multiple tuners crashes so badly for me?  I've been
dead in the water for a week on this problem, essentially, and it was
only after many days of banging my head against the problem that I
finally sent mail here. about it was yesterday.  But nobody has (yet)
offered any suggestions...

Should I have asked on the -dev lists instead?  This smells of some
sort of ivtv initialization error, but I don't know for sure.

Can someone at least tell me if some of my questions make sense and
might help?  Like, how do I know if the various "alias" lines ever
really got used by the kernel?  (The initialization is complicated
enough, with a zillion scripts running in various places, and several
methods (some of which claim that they're obsolete), that it's not
clear to me; maybe I should just jam 'em into modules.conf even though
it says "don't edit me!" and see?  Are there ordering dependencies?)
What happens if they -aren't- seen?

Why is it that the first 250 seems to be initialized w/different
bitrates than the rest?  Is that a clue?  How do I fix it if so?

Does it matter that IRQ's were duplicated when ivtv inited the cards?

Does -anyone- have a working KnoppMyth R5A22 setup w/more than one
PVR-250 in the same machine?

Should I drop back to A16 and see if it's more stable?  I see mail
just today saying that A22 used an SVN version; is A16 considered
generally more stable?  [I'd -really- like to avoid the effort of
building from scratch from some other distro if I can possibly just
get this debugged; that's many, many hours for me since I've never
tried it before---and I don't even know if -that- will work!]

(Yes, I'll ask these questions on the KnoppMyth forums, too, but some
of the answers there to previous problems [which turned out to be real
bugs, not failure to follow installation instructions] were more of a
cargo-cult "reinstall! reinstall!  reinstall!" flavor as opposed to
how to actually debug the situation...)

Thanks!