[mythtv-users] testing the pinnacle 800i?

James Crow james at ultratans.com
Mon Jan 19 21:30:16 UTC 2009


On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 22:16 -0500, Gordon McLellan wrote:
> I have followed the wiki instructions, and the card is detected and
> firmware is loaded.
> 
> The card shows up as either an Analog V4L card, or a Samsung DVB
> tuner.  I would like to perform a test capture, to make sure the card
> actually works, before I dive in to configuring it with myth.  My PC
> also has a pvr-500 in it, and both tuners are working as expected.
> 
> To test the pvr, it is really easy:
> 
> mplayer /dev/video1
> 
> this shows a video stream for channel 2
> 
> To test the analog portion of the 800i, I try:
> 
> mplayer /dev/video0
> 
> Mplayer complains about missing avisynth.dll (and the list just goes
> on and on, I hunt down and feed it one library after another).  I do
> have win32codecs and all sorts of other non-free stuff installed from
> the Mediabuntu repo.  I don't think it is a missing codec problem.
> 
> I also tried scanning the dvb section of the card, both using the
> "scan" command, and myth's scanner.  Neither find any channels, even
> though a tv with a digital tuner finds plenty of clear-qam channels on
> the cable (Charter west-Michigan).
> 
> I tried capturing some video, and playing it back on windows, but
> windows says the file is corrupt or not a video file (even tried VLC).
> 
> Any suggestions for testing this card, short of installing Windows?
> 
> Thanks a bunch!
> 
> Gordon
> gmail: gordonthree

I used xawtv to test the analog side of mine when I first installed it.
When you run the scan for the DVB side make sure you try all the cable
frequencies. Something like

scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/scan/examples/US_CABLE_Center

I am not in front of my machine so I don't recall the exact name of the
file, but there is more than one for cable. Try to scan with all of
them.

Cheers,
James




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