I think that the root of my issue is the channel frequencies, wht kind of luck have people had with digital cable?

My Hardware:
Dell Dimension 8300 MoBo in 4550 Case (nice and quiet)
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHZ
1 GB PC2700
WD 250GB (IDE)
(2) HD-3000
Nvidia MX440 (w/ TV-out)
Soundblaster Live....
Software:
Knoppmyth R5A22
Provider:
Comcast digital cable (Los Angeles)

So I went through a couple installs of Knoppmyth R5A30.2 and couldn't get a channel tuned to save my life. I went back to R5A22, and did the following:
Auto-Install w/ the TV flag at boot so I could install w/ the TV-out. The install went smoothly.
Mythtv-setup:
1. General - left as default
2. Capture cards:
a. Card type DVB, Card number 0,
showed up as pcHDTV HD3000
b. Card type DVB, Card number 1
showed up as pcHDTV HD3000
3. Video Sources:
Using data direct entered my UID and PSWD got linups, Comcast-CableDigital-Digital-*****-CA*****:X
left frequency table as default
4. Input connections: set source to my comcast source, set staring channel to 83#10 (as that had scanned and locked before)
5. edit channels: no action

I exited and ran mythfilldatabase, while doing this I ssh'd into the box and installed the HD3000 firmware from the pcHDTV folks into /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware
finished mythfilldatabase and rebooted so the new firmware would be loaded. I stopped mythtvbackend then ran mythtv-setup again, made sure all setting were as I left them and then scanned for channels (at this point all my datadirect channels are listed) it only locked on maybe 10 channels mostly 83#1 through 10. I then exited set up restarted the backend and then went into mythfrontend. when I go to live tv I get the initial channel then nothing else, it locks up changing in either direction, and is barely watchable on the one channel I am recieving (constant glitching and drop out).

any suggestions? Sorry to be a n00b but I'm just frustrated at this point.

Thank you,

Slackadmin

You probably need to go through your cable box.

I had thought about that, but it is my understanding that if set up that way I lose the scheduled recording functionality of Myth. I suppose that is better than my current situation of one semi-clear channel (animal planet) all the time. Is there a way to grab the unencrypted signal that is processed by the cable box before it send to its internal tuner? (I keep thinking that is the small input/output loop on the back of the cable box????)

Thank you for the reply.

MythTV can control the cable box by various means. Most commonly using what is called an "IRBlaster" which allows it to emulates the IR remote. Time to read some documentation for you... http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO.html#toc8.7

I thought it might come to this, but I was hoping to circumvent the cablebox entirely. I went ahead and did a fresh install of knoppmyth r5b7, and it seemed to pick up a lot more channels, using QAM 256 hrc. I'm going to play with those channels for a while and see what I can grab mixing and matching frequency tables. Thank you for the reply and back to the myth docs I go.