so, i have been trying to get a knoppmyth box running, and seem to have it installed, outputing video to my TV and connecting to the web, but i still am not able to watch tv with the system. i tried searching the forums but couldn't find the answers i was looking for, so i apologize if these are noobie questions.

my setup:

Knoppmyth R5C7

AMD 1800+, 1.25GB ram, pvr-350, chaintech av-710 soundcard, nvidea geforce 6200 with s-video out hooked to my TV. storage is 2x250GB IDE hard drives. i hope to use the silver/black remote that came with the pvr-350 to control mythtv

source: RCN digital cable -> motorola digital cable box (can't find a model # but it has no s-video out or firewire, only coaxial in/out, rca out, and a serial port on the back.

so i ran the coax out of my cable box into my pvr-350, plugged the s-video out of the nvidea card to the tv, booted off the CD and installed with no problem. i set up an account on data direct and got my listings downloaded no problem. i even paused the install just after setting up DHCP to download the firmware drivers for the pvr-350 and expanded the drivers into /lib/firmware

in the setup section i chose "tuner" as a source (chose the x-50 option for capture card) and set the channel to 3 since i have a cable box (note that on my system, the cable box is only needed for the premium channels if that matters.)

once i rebooted, i tried to watch tv, but the screen shows blank for a minute or so before returning to the main myth screen. web works, weather works, news works, i don't have any media files yet, and haven't even started with DVDs and all that yet.

came across 2 questions during the install i was unsure about: the first was that i was asked if i wanted to configure for TV-out from the pvr-350 (i thought no since i was using the nvidea for s-video out) the second was if i was using an "ir blaster". i wasn't sure, but i did have the IR dongle hooked to the mini-jack input on the pvr-350, so i said "yes" but was then prompted for the serial port it was connected to, and i knew it wasn't the right choice.

so, my questions are:

1) how do i set up the IR remote feature? will this control my cable box too, or should i get a serial cable and hook the PC to the cable box via serial? how would i set this up?

2) why can't i watch tv? what did i do wrong? i knew the cable box would be a problem, but i thought i could at least get whatever channel it was set to this way.

follow-up:

tried taking the cable box out of the mix... now i get 88 or so channels, and of course i find out that the remote "just works" out of the box. i still need to figure out how to do the cable box control, i just am glad to see that the signal is good and the pvr-350 is working.

now there is no sound, despite my running the audio out of the pvr-350 dongle into the line in on my soundcard (chaintech av-710) went into alsamixer and raised the volume and unmuted "line" but am still getting no sound.

**update**

now, just for testing purposes: i have the output from the soundcard run into "vcr" on my reciever and the output from the pvr350 run into the "video" input on my reciever (so there is no need to be messing with the line in on the soundcard for the moment.)

neither of these is giving me sound out at the moment, either with live tv or with mpeg files played off the hard drive.

i did run alsaconf and chose my sound card, as well as ran alsamixer and saw that it was indeed using my sound card and that i had master levels raised, etc.

i looked for a setting for audio under mythtv and found none. read somewhere about a box under tv->settings->playback to NOT check which only uses pvr350 audio for output, but i don't see that anywhere.

Full path from the top level is:
"Utilities/setup" -> "setup" -> "tv settings" -> "Playback" -> 4th screen
You need to have the "Use PVR-350 decoder" checked to see it.

yeah, ok, i tried that, but you see, i don't want to use the pvr-350 for TV-out. as i said before, i use the nvidea 6200 for that, i only use the pvr350 to capture the video.

when turn on the option you suggest it can no longer play any recorded video at all, so i turned it back off, that isn't the problem as far as i can tell.

so again, the problem is that i am not getting any audio from either my sound card OR directly from the pvr350.

any ideas??

also, for some reason, all my channels seem to be one off from where they are supposed to be, so when i choose programs to record, it chooses the wrong ones.

and of course i need to get the cable box working too.

**UPDATE**

ok so sound is working. turns out that upon reboot default sound reverted to the built in audio card, not the chaintech av-710. so i stopped the backend, ran alsaconf, re-ran the setup just to make sure, and re-started the backend and restarted myth tv

bingo.

sound out of the sound card... no need to connect the audio out of the pvr-350 as long as i don't use that for tv-out i guess.

however it is still having the problem that everything is actually 1 channel lower than it should be... for instance it says i am watching channel 76, but i am actually watching 77

very weird indeed.

Huhn? If you're not using the PVR-350's decoder to playback the recording, why would you even expect the sound from it? The audio is part of the MPEG-2 stream. If the stream never goes into the decoder, neither the video or audio are going to come out of the decoder. Based on what you said the PVR-350 simply isn't in the equation.

Have you tested playing a recordings with something like xine, mplayer, or even on another box to make sure the sound is getting captured?

Have you tried a simple sound test like playing music or even just:


Have you done the av-710 setup stuff? There should be a posting here with all the details.

you're right, sorry about that, i was being dumb about the soundcard, should have checked the built in one as well, that would have answered that question right away...

the wrong channel thing is annoying though. **EDIT** solution to that was found here http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=11225


as for the cable box issue, i assume that with a db9 serial cable connected between the pc and the cable box, and the right script, i will be able to use the cable box as well... just have to find the script and config options.