[juneau-lug] MythTV, Hauppage PVR250 and GCI Cable TV

  • From: James Zuelow <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: jlug <juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 15:53:02 -0800

I have a working PVR setup that I can demo (non portable demo unfortunately) if 
anyone is interested.
If I have time I'll do a writeup on everything I had to do and put it on the 
jlug website.

Right now I've got MythTV running with MySQL, a Hauppage PVR250 tuner/mpeg2 
encoder card, and a GCI cable connection going straight to the back of the box.

Now I can record the Star Trek DS9 episodes on during the day and watch them 
when I get home from work.  No messy VCR tape!

Setting it up wasn't too terribly difficult, but there were some gotchas.

The PVR250 isn't a bttv card, so you have to build and install ivtv modules.  
This means you need a developer environment (kernel source, headers, gcc, etc.)

The ivtv website will say that PVR205's with US NTSC tuners are Phillips "type 
2" tuners.  Looks like some of them are actually "type 39" tuners (like mine).  
All you get is static if you specify the wrong tuner type.

MythTV is very sensitive to the sound card being available, even when it is 
recording and there is no sound output.  So I ended up replacing my OSS sound 
drivers with ALSA drivers.  MythTV seems to like the ALSA drivers better.

And I'm on a VIA chipset motherboard, which allegedly does not perform well 
with MythTV.  (Although in my experience things got a lot better when I 
switched over to ALSA from OSS.)

Debian Sarge, KDE 3.2, Athlon XP 2000+, 256MB DDR RAM, onboard video (ProSavage 
8) and audio (VIA).

Cheers,

James

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