It has been a long road, but I finally got this combo working very nicely. It has taken a lot of reading and reading and searching and searching, but honestly, all the roadblocks and hiccups have been cleared up with V5A10.

Most of my setup was tier 1, but I hit some snags and followed Cesman's admonitions to search search search. Does that make it really tier 2? No. I worked around them with fairly simple, but VERY RECENT fixes. Plus, Hauppage 250s are taking up too much of the tier 1 page and seem to be scarcer these days, so I say bring on the Hauppie alternatives! I can now vouch for this Leadtek bttv card and a Philips SAA7134-based card. Both of these are about half the price of a 250 or less.

Here's the setup:

Chaintech 7NIF4 (onboard lan and vga) - Lan was fine. This board's lan was NOT recognized by an older V4R4 disc I had. My older 7NIF2 was recognized, but the NIF4...nope. The move to the 2.6 kernel seems to have cleared up all the nVidia pain of the past. Well, almost. The onboard vga would not work with the 6629 drivers (or at least I couldn't google my way out of it...also couldn't do it in Gentoo either). X would work with the regular nv driver, but who wants that? Nothing a $50-70 5200 couldn't fix. Once I plugged the new card in, we are back to Tier 1.

AMD Semp 2300 - Great chip. Snappy and cheap.

512M RAM - Seems like enough.

Leadtek TV2000XP - Older BT878A chip which is recognized, but Knopp autoconfigures the tuner wrong. A switch in handling modules made fixing this a royal pain until you find a great recent message by Xsecrets to set you straight. Edit bttv and tuner in /etc/modules (not /etc/modules/myth, /etc/myth/modules, etc not anywhere else or your options will be overwritten) to read:

bttv card=34 tuner=2
tuner type=2

I tried doing things "the Gentoo way" and it didn't work. It also didn't work the "old" Knoppmyth way. This might be a hard Tier 1, but the answers are recently part of this great public record. Xsecrets is a freakin ninja.

(As an aside, I got a Philips SAA7134 based card - LifeView FlyVideo 3000 for this project but got stuck by the modules issue about. My bet is that the same method would work by passing

options saa7134 card=2 tuner=8 dsp_nr=1 mixer_nr=1 oss=1 oss_rate=3200

Note that this line is slightly different from the other information I could find online regarding this card (either the tuner or card...can't remember) If you are having trouble, try this combo. Works great with tvtime on Gentoo and the quality is better than the Leadtek.

Watching and recording live tv together shows about 40-45% CPU and load avg around 1.5-2.5. Any idea how this compares to others?

Seagate 160G - Great, quiet drive.

Coolermaster Cavelier T02 - So nice, but can't make analog dial work. Whatever...not myth's fault.

Only thing I am unhappy with: Stock AMD fan. So noisy.

Ok, that's it. The final piece of the puzzle was not myth related, but is pretty cool (to me) and may answer someone's question or give them an idea.

I was faced wtih a problem of having a webserver on one computer and mythweb on the box above. How do you access 2 computers at 2 different lan ip's through a single external ip? Once again, Xsecrets to the rescue. Tell your router to pass port 80 to your webserver (like normal, probably) and pass 8080 (or whatever) to your mythbox internal ip. Then edit /etc/apache/http.conf to Port 8080. Restart apache or the whole computer and...check it out.

mysite.mydomain.org -> normal webserver (192.168.1.100)
mysite.mydomain.org:8080/mythweb -> mythweb (192.168.1.101)

Careful, you are now wide open. This was more of a proof of concept for when I figure out a good way to lock it down with a password. htaccess might be it, but maybe not.

Thanks Cesman and Xsecrets. You have organized a very complete implementation of this software and backed it up with great support.

Off to enjoy. I might update my summary when I hook this up to my Benq 7200 projector.

nrj