HDTV card suggestion. I am looking to see if there is a card that is known to work well the latest releases of KnoppMyth.

Are there any out there that I could simply purchase, put it in the machine and with a little tweaking, get working?

I have two HD-3000 and one HD-2000 cards in my box. They are made by pcHDTV and they work perfectly with MythTv. Other cards may work as well, but I only have experience with these.

http://www.pchdtv.com

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I have one PCHD3000 and it works well. But I'm having trouble with one OTA channels that just went live, and am going to try a AirStar-HD5000-PCI as my second tuner.
Why would I expect another card to work better?
I have the same (OTA) signal split between my HD3000 and my stand-alone STB, which is an LG LST-4200a. It's got a 4th generation LG tuner, and is supposed to be excellent at handling multipath.

That's what I've got, multipath. On analog stations on the LG box, I see ghosting to the right.

The LG STB pulls in all of the digital stations perfectly, with no drop-outs on channel 8-1 (the one that gives me the most trouble with drop-outs on the HD3000).

The AirStar HD5000 has a 5th-generation LG tuner, so I expect that it'll be as good or better than my LG STB. I'll just tell the HD3000 to ignore channel 8-1, and then I expect that I'll be in good shape.

The AirStar HD4000 is now only $119 at the dragon store http://mythic.tv

I am assuming these cards listed work pretty much out of the box with KnoppMyth, I am going to do some more research and I really appreciate the input.

-B

I am assuming that some people have tried.....So is the Airstar HD5000 better than the pchdtv hd3000? Does it get better OTA reception with the 5th gen chipset? It is much cheaper than the HD3000, I just want to make sure that I am won't miss out on something.

I just installed the Air2PC5000 alongside the HD3000 last night. I'll report back in a few days, regarding reception.
But I can confirm that it IS a lot cheaper. Only $119 at mythic.tv

any luck thornsoft?

I installed about 6 days. MythTV picked it up upon boot-up, I saw the driver loading. I'm not sure if MythTV does this, or if it's one of Cecil's scripts. I think I saw a posting of his saying that he scans for new cards on every boot. Nice job!
I didn't have to go and get any drivers, or configure the PC to know about the second one.

Once into Myth, I ran into a bit of trouble, but nothing serious. I'm on R5A26, BTW, on a "not-quite-dragon". Once I got into myth-setup, it saw the card. I set it up as a DVB thing, same as with the HD3000. But it wouldn't do a proper channel scan. I was able to "scan existing transports" (I found a write-up that said to do that), and it used the ones that the 3000 had found previously, and that worked.

After I got past that, I raised the priority on the new card, and then raised the priority on the CBS channel (the one that I was having problems with), so it almost always records CBS on the new card. I'm finding MythWeb handy for seeing what's going to hit each card, and the logs let me know what DID hit each card. Otherwise, it's not very obvious, when comparing.

I'm using the same "source" (I called it "antenna") for both, as to not have to deal with two sets of Zap2It data (don't know if that would be a problem, but I wasn't looking for more problems, so I took the path of least resistance).

The Air2PC seems better. Fewer drop-outs than with the HD3000.

Reception isn't pefect yet, but it's not the card's fault. I'm running in parallel with my old STB (LG LST-4200a) which has a very good 4th gen LG/Zenith tuner. And it is occasionally dropping on channel 8.1, and I keep it tuned there all the time to watch for "no signal". I don't know if it's still startup jitters at the station, or if my multipath situation is so bad that I can't count on anything. But the PC HD3000 was unwatchable on this station, in the best of times. The Air2PC5000 is usually good, unless the stand-alone STB is also having trouble maintaining a lock.

$119 at mythic.tv, free shipping via USPS priority mail. Seemed to only take a few days to get here. I'm very happy with it, and if I was building another system, I'd get two of these. I don't need any NTSC, and never used that capability of the PCHD3000 anyway.

And the tuner portion of the card does indeed have the LG logo on it.

Summary: Tentiative thumbs-up. Recommended for areas with multipath interference, or if you want to save $50 on a second HD tuner. But the channel scanning problem (on R5A26 anyway) could de-rail first-time installations, so the HD3000 may be a better "general purpose" HD card for now.

BTW, having two HD cards is SWEET.

Does anyone know if the scanning is fixed in the newer releases r5a30.2

I guess this would be a myth fix so does .19 improve on the channel scanning issues?

Yes.