Hi,

I have a KnoppMyth PVR that works great and has been in constant use for over 18 months. I recently did some hardware and software upgrades and am going to try to receive and record HDTV signals. I'd appreciate a quick review of my planned HDTV system and any comments on whether it has problems before I add in the final HD-3000 card (now on order from pchdtv.com).

System hardware as is:

Antec Quiet Case with 350W PS w/ 120MM case fan
P4 Prescott 3.2 GHz 800MHz FSB w/Zalman Cu heatsink
ECS 848P-A motherboard
1 GB DDR PC3200 RAM
Chaintech Geforce MX4000 128MB DDR AGP 4X/8X Video Card
wireless kbd
PS/2 mouse
tuner 1: PVR-250 (model 32032 old style) w/gray remote
tuner 2: PVR-250 (model 32062 new style)
tuner 3: ATI TV Wonder VE
hda: 80 GB IDE
hdb: 200 GB IDE
hdc: NEC 3250 DVD+-RW
hdd: 200 GB IDE

Display is a regular NTSC TV using S-Video connection (I realize it won't have HDTV resolution but it should still work right?)

There are two empty PCI slots

Software is KnoppMyth R5A16 fresh auto upgrade with minor tweaks.

other factors:

/myth is a ~450GB VG consisting of hda4, hdb, and hdd using LVM

The PVR has about 300 GB of various TV recordings that must be kept.

My plan is to follow the instructions here: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ight=human

Maybe it is not the best approach but it seems reasonable to me to get the HDTV receiver PVR working first with the normal SD TV display. If that works satisfactorily then I will consider sinking the big bucks into a HDTV display.

Is there anything else you need to know?

Thoughts?

Lessons learned?

Am I going to fall into a pit?

I'd rather ask the stupid questions and get the answers *before* blowing up my PVR so please don't be shy.

Andrew Lynch

From my own personal experiences I have a cheap DVB-T card and once configured properly it works well. I connect to my TV via composite to a standard 62cm TV and the picture looks great.

The only issue that I have had is when trying to watch HDTV, I have found that my signal is no strong enough to give me a clean, steady picture, i.e. the video is very jerky. Apart from that all is good.

I hope it all goes well.

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Girkers

In knoppmyth R5A16 at least with the default configs a pchdtv3000 and a bttv card will not play nice in the same box.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Thanks for the tip! That is the first I have heard of an incompatibility between the bt878 card and the HD3000.

What do you suggest as a new strategy?

The most obvious to me is to just remove the ATI TV Wonder VE out and install the HD3000.

I did a quick search for bttv and hd3000 and didn't see any posts to resolve the conflict. Any suggestions or links?

Thanks for your help!!

Andrew Lynch

PS, actually I had another question...

I have a zap2it.com account configured for regular cable listings in my area. Do I just "add a lineup" to my existing zap2it account or start a new account for the HD3000? Will adding a lineup for "local broadcast" interfere with my existing cable line up configuration?

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

I have seen others suggest that an athlon64 is a better choice because they run cooler especially when idle.

I can answer the second question: yep, you just add a new lineup, select the HD channels you can get, then attach that lineup to your HD3000 in mythtv-setup.

Thanks! I'll do that.

I do not know yet which channels I can receive (antennaweb.org indicates several, we'll see!) so I'll just add them all and remove the bad ones later.

Cool! Can't wait to get going on HDTV!

Andrew Lynch

well I would just suggest removing the ati ve card. I know of no fix. I spend about two days trying to get the 2000 to play nice with my leadtek 2000, and ended up just moving the 2000 out to another box.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Xsecrets,

Thanks for the pointers. I appreciate your help!

Do you think there is a fundamental incompatibility with bttv between the bt878 based card and the HD-3000 or is it just a tough configuration issue?



I have had problems getting my ATI TV Wonder VE to work correctly before (with the PVR-250s) but it usually comes down to specifying bttv options in the right module configuration file. On my recent configuration, I had to find out which bttv file was being included in the modules.conf file during "update-modules ; depmod -a" step.

It turns out that it was /etc/mythtv/modules/bttv2 so I added the line "options bttv card=64 tuner=2" and did the update-modules ; depmod -a , rebooted, and then the bt878 card worked just fine.

During the HD-3000 install, I will just remove the bt878 card and comment out its module options in bttv2 but it would be nice to install it later and get it working.

tools I used to debug the configuration were:

#grep "bttv" </etc/modules.conf

and

#modprobe -c | grep "bttv"

These revealed a ton of useful information about module options, etc.



I was sort of surprised to see the HD-3000 is using a modified bttv driver to put the MPEG2 data stream into the processor. I was expecting to see something like the ivtv/Hauppauge PVR-250 interface to pull in MPEG2 stream directly.


I am new to HDTV so all of this is new to me.

Thanks for your help, I am sure you saved me pulling my hair out trying to resolve the bt878 vs HD-3000 incompatibility.

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

I would say it's a basic incompatibility as my bttv card has always worked fine till I put the 3000 card in there, then all I could ever get out of it was a green screen no matter what settings I used, and I knew well what settings it needed.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets