I just bought a pcHDTV5500 card and stuggled to set up HDTV reception but now that I have things figured out here is a quick guide to setting up a new pcHDTV5500 card for HDTV OTA (over the air) reception.

First follow cesman's instructions for installing new drivers at: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10580

now that is over with...

First kill the backend


Your next step is to figure out what channels you get and setup "transports". Do this by running:



Don't worry about disturbing messages like "tuning failed" from this program, just keep plugging along.

Next, relaunch the frontend


Enter setup with alt+s
Delete your old tuner and add a new tuner
The driver should be DVB DTV and not the pcHDTV driver! I believe the pcHDTV driver is only for analog reception. We want digital HDTV (and SDTV) so use the DVB DTV driver! The default settings worked fine for me.

Setup a new input under video sources (#3). Go to zap2it labs and setup a new listing if you already haven't. Include all the channels or not, it doesn't matter. We will come back to zap2it later. Be sure, back in mythtv, that you use bcast channel frequencies under that option.

Now under input connections add the broadcast listing. Scan for channels if you want but we are going to delete them all anyway.

Now go to #5, channel editor in the mythtv setup menu. First delete all those evil confusing channels which you sadly do not receive. Then click on Channel Scanner. Under scan type select import channels.conf. Enter the channels.conf file location we made early (/root/channels.conf) and scan away.

Back to the channel scanner again and select scan "Full scan of existing transports".

Now for the hard part. Get a piece of paper and pen and write down the names of all the channels that you now actually recieve from the channel editor window. Go back to your zap2it labs listing and make sure only those channels are listed in your listing. Exit out of setup and the frontend.

Now run mythfilldatabase
restart the backend and frontend


And you should be ready to go.
All of this is necessary for a few reasons. First if mythtv tries to tune a weak signal it will give you a blank screen and you will have to restart both backend and frontend to watch/record TV again. Second, my channels.conf file did not list the identity of each channel that the tuner was able to lock on to.

Hope this helps. Feel free to reformat this post.
My system is running great now with AC3 sound fed out of my computer over SPDIF and XVMC decoding the HDTV signal on a nvidia 5200. Which is all displayed on a proview 32" LCD TV.

I think the "pcHDTV" tuner type is only for the original HD-2000 card. It doesn't do DVB at all, if I'm not mistaken. All other pcHDTV cards should use the newer and better DVB setting.

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Even the 2000 is supported via the DVB driver!

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

D'oh! Maybe that's why I can't get my 2000 working!

It's summer doldrums so I was going to update to the latest R5Cxx release and see if I could get it humming with my two HD-3000s again.

Oops... thread jack...

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well yes all hd cards should use dvb drivers, but you have an additional problem I don't think the 5500's are supported "out of the box" on any publicly released version yet. you need to search the forums on how to install the drivers for them.

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Xsecrets

Is there any special settings or setup to get the analogue portion working?

if I setup v4l Analogue... I get snow, and the audio chips (almost feedback sounding)

don't really know why would you waste that much money and use the analog portion when you can get one of those for about 15 dollars?

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Xsecrets

Not all channels in my area are available HD... Also if the analogue can be set up then there is another recorder.

There will be a PVR-150 in there... but if I want to watch regular (non-hdtv) programs and record another regular program also not on hdtv.

I just wanted to know.

I'm fairly certain you can't use it as both, I know for a fact you cannot use it as both simultaneously.

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Xsecrets

I was able to test it out on a win32 system.... and using the ATI MMC (which was pretty cool that it worked) and it did come up as separate source.

I realize that it will not be able to be used at the same time.

Just wondering if anyone had been able to use it as both.

Total noob here... thanks for the tips! Can anyone tell me how this would be different with QAM? I get clear QAM over my Comcast cable in Philly (tried it with a DVICO card under Windows, picture was good but the software was terrible) and I am planning to set up a Myth box. I suspect the difference has to do with the way you scan for channels, but I'm not sure.

Also, I know you can use the pcHDTV 5500 for both digital and analog TV, but has anyone actually done it? Some shows I want are on analog only, but most of my stuff is digital, and I can only afford one card to start out.

Rhambus

If you upgrade to the SVN version of MythTV you can use both analog and digital tuners (edit: not simultaneously; there's only one RF section). To get things to work right you'll have to set up two DataDirect lineups, one with only the digital channels and one with only the analog, and assign accordingly.

As for QAM... I wouldn't recommend it under MythTV unless you're really stubborn. The listings service doesn't include the actual QAM channel and program numbers, and there's no screen to set them up manually. What I did is find the channels by hand (using my new HDTV on a rainy day) and construct a table mapping the Comcast channel numbers to the real channel numbers, then scan the channels using MythTV. Then I wrote a perl script to merge the scanned channels with the channels from the guide. This would have worked, except MythTV gets the QAM channel numbers wrong. So I fixed that (and submitted a bug report which was summarily rejected, guess that'll be the last time I do that), and did it again, and now it works. But like I said, I wouldn't recommend it.

yes qam is a pain especially for comcast since they ignore the FCC rules and strip the psid information. Though if someone happens to have posted a listing for your area over on the mythtv wiki it makes things quite a bit easier.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Wo ... ble_layout

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Xsecrets

Do you know how to set up the devices? or what devices should be?

Prowler -- you set it up as a DVB device like you would normally, then select Analog options in the DVB setup dialog and point it at /dev/video0.

XSecrets, I have a mapping from Comcast channel number to channel.subchannel as displayed on my digital TV. Right now my problem is that the subchannels don't seem to correspond exactly to service ids. I think what they are is a one-based INDEX to the service ids -- that is, if a transport has 2, 3, 5, and 7, my subchannel number is 1, 2, 3, 4. But my cable went out last night when I was trying to confirm this, and it hasn't come back yet.