Ok, been a while. My video card died and couldn't get a new one until this week. I tried using your script, I still get "can't do setuid (cannot exec sperl)" When trying to use the script under the mythtv user. As root, it works flawlessly.
If no one knows how to get this working under the mythtv account, can anyone tell me how to make the pvr log in as root instead of mythtv? I'm beyond caring about security issues at this point. I just want it to work.

What is the exact command you are issuing? If you didn't specify the full path, there's a chance that root and the mythtv user are running 2 different scripts (depending on their $PATH values), and therefore giving 2 different results.

This would indicate that the script the mythtv user is running may not be the same one as root, as there is no sperl that I am aware of (probably has #!/usr/bin/sperl as the very first line in the script).