I have been raving about MythTV to my friends since November of last year. One of my friends has become interested in setting up MythTV, so he purchased a PVR-350 and we began setting it up last night using the latest version of KnoppMyth (R5B7).

Hardware: 800 MhZ, AMD CPU, VIA chipset, 512 Mb RAM, Nvidia graphics card, PVR-350.

Topography: Pretty simple. US cable (no cable box) connected directly to PVR-350, cable internet connection

Problem: We have run into a problem with the part of the installation that configures the backend server, specifically the '4. Input Connections' screen. When we do the 'Channel Scan' option, a small window appears with a progress bar and percentage. It takes between 2-4 minutes to complete, and when finished only 4 channels appear in the list (2, 4, 5 and 6). We then exit out of the backend setup, run 'mythfilldatabase' and start the frontend and only these 4 channels appear, the other channels are snow.

Additional Information:

1. If we click on the 'Fetch listings from source' button on the '4. Input Connections' screen, no progress bar appears and this results in all of the channels showing up as snow when watching live TV.

2. In the 'Edit Channels' option of the backend configuration tool, we can see all of the channels listed.

3. When we view the 'Program Guide' in the MythTV frontend, all of the channels are listed with program data.

4. In the 'General' screen of the backend configuration tool, we selected 'us-cable', should it be something else? How do we know if we should use 'us-bcast' or us-cable-hrc'?

5. In the 'Video Sources' screen of th backend configuration tool, we 'Retrieved Lineup' and this goes pretty quick, but appears to be working.

6. 'mythfilldatabase' command appears to be working (see #3 above).

7. R5B7 is new to me, and I don't quite understand the requirement of using 'Scan Channels' option versus 'Fetch listing from source'.

I have searched this forum for a similar problem but I haven't found it yet. If it is here, please post a link and I will be sure to read it.

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

Dr. Hood

_________________
KnoppMyth: R5B7
Video Output: 27 inch TV (4:3)
Motherboard: Biostar K8NHA Grand mobo w/nForce3 250Gb
CPU: AMD Sempron 3000+ (1.8 Ghz)
RAM: 1024 Mb
Videocard: Radeon 9500 (64 Mb)
TV Tuner Card: PVR-350
Harddisk: WD160 Gb + Max 300 Gb

Channel scan is for people who DO NOT have a program guide available to them. Since you're a US user you should be doing a zap2it datadirect setup. See the note at the top of this page: http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=KnoppMythInstall or here in the mythtv documentation: http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-5.html#ss5.3

Thanks for the reply tjc,

We reinstalled and tried us-cable and us-hrc (US-bcast is for broadcast signals).

After doing this it recognized all of the channels. We actually scanned first, and most of the channels were off by 1 channel number. Then did the fetch and it worked.

However, it is not stable. After surfing for a while, it hangs and then we have to reboot.

Any idea of why it might hang?

Dr. Hood

_________________
KnoppMyth: R5B7
Video Output: 27 inch TV (4:3)
Motherboard: Biostar K8NHA Grand mobo w/nForce3 250Gb
CPU: AMD Sempron 3000+ (1.8 Ghz)
RAM: 1024 Mb
Videocard: Radeon 9500 (64 Mb)
TV Tuner Card: PVR-350
Harddisk: WD160 Gb + Max 300 Gb

These directions are for North American users using the tuner on their card and getting a signal "straight from the wall" (no cable or statellite box).

- Before you start make sure you've got your zap2it account setup properly. Remember this is at labs.zap2it.com, and you need to define you lineups there.

- Get back into mythtv-setup. http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... MytTVsetup

- Under 1. General go to the 3rd page and make sure that you have the correct "channel frequency table" set. It should be one of "us-cable", "us-bcast", "us-cable-hrc", "us-cable-irc". If you're hooked to an antenna use "us-bcast", if you're hooked to a cable system try "us-cable" first, but don't be shocked if you have to come back to try the other options. Continue through the rest of the pages until you "finish" and go back to the main menu.

- Under 2. Capture cards if you have any cards defined select (delete all cards) then select (new capture card) and add a definition for you first card. In this case it should be type MPEG-2 encoder card..., selecting this will reduce the number of other entry fields to two, the Video device should be /dev/video0 and the default input should be Tuner 0. (NOTE - for a PVR-150 or 500 this is just "Tuner"), then hit enter and return to the main menu.

- Under 3. Video Sources if you have any video sources defined select (delete all video sources) then select (new video source) and add a definition for your zap2it account. Call the new video source "Cable" (it doesn't matter what you call it but me picking a name here avoids confusion later). Your XMLTV listing grabber should be "North America (DataDirect)", enter your zap2it user id and password in the appropriate boxes and then click on the "Retrieve Lineup" button. When that completes, select your lineup from the pull down. Leave the other settings alone and hit enter to finish back to the main menu.

- Under 4. Input connections select the line for "Tuner 0" and hit enter. Set your Video Source to "Cable", your starting channel to something you know tunes reliably on your TV, and leave everything else alone. (input preference should be 0 everything else blank) Once again finish back to the main menu.

- Hit Escape to exit from mythtv-setup.

- Get a shell window as the mythtv user. From the desktop this is just Alt-X. Enter the command mythfilldatabase and hit enter. This will take a while to run. When it finishes, enter the command exit to close your shell session.

- Hit Alt-3 to restart the backend and Alt-M to bring up the front end.

Because you failed to read the prominently posted warnings about certain hardware?

Say for example here:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6321
And here:
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=PickingComponents
And here:
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=MotherBoards
And here:
http://www.hauppauge.com/html/lockups.htm#MOMLIST
And ... Oh, I'm tired, can we stop now? If I have to explain this to one more person I think I'm going to scream...

Thanks Tjc!

Your comments are much, much welcome. Keep doing what you are doing. Looks like we will replace the VIA motherboard with either an NVIDIA or INTEL based chipset. It seems that turning off 'NTSC-Closed Captioning' in the '1. General' screen has eliminated the hanging problem. Probably not enough CPU power to do closed captioning.

Just to note, we did have to do the 'scan' and 'fetch' options in the '4. Input Connections' even though we are using a direct cable line to the MythTV box. It seemed that this was necessary. Hopefully, there will be documentation at MythTV on options of this new '4. Input Connections'.

Thanks again.

Dr. Hood

_________________
KnoppMyth: R5B7
Video Output: 27 inch TV (4:3)
Motherboard: Biostar K8NHA Grand mobo w/nForce3 250Gb
CPU: AMD Sempron 3000+ (1.8 Ghz)
RAM: 1024 Mb
Videocard: Radeon 9500 (64 Mb)
TV Tuner Card: PVR-350
Harddisk: WD160 Gb + Max 300 Gb

No way. Datadirect users deffently should not use the "scan for channels" option. After you exit mythtv-setup mythfilldatabase will run and fill in all the channels for you.

What Ryan said, the blasted scan button should be grayed out for SDTV data direct users liike it used to be. The only reason they changed that was the flakeyness around HDTV sources. And the mythfilldatabase would have done the fetch so it was at least redundant. Maybe I wasn't clar enough that you shouldn't have expected to see channels until after you ran the fill.

ryanpatterson and tjc,

Thank you for the followups. It is clear that scan and fetch are not necessary. I didn't get in previous post that this information would appear in the '4. Input Connections' screen until after the 'mythfilldatabase' command was run....I agree, for DataDirect, the scan and fetch should be greyed out. Oh well, a little confusion hasn't hurt and hopefully this thread will helps others with R5Beta7....

Thanks again....

Dr. Hood

_________________
KnoppMyth: R5B7
Video Output: 27 inch TV (4:3)
Motherboard: Biostar K8NHA Grand mobo w/nForce3 250Gb
CPU: AMD Sempron 3000+ (1.8 Ghz)
RAM: 1024 Mb
Videocard: Radeon 9500 (64 Mb)
TV Tuner Card: PVR-350
Harddisk: WD160 Gb + Max 300 Gb