I need some help setting up the HD3000 (I have 2 shiny new cards).

When R5A15 came out Cecil's announcement said that he did NOT use the 2.0 drivers that make the HD3000 look like a DVB card. However, this post http://pchdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=736 claims that R5A15 does use the dvb drivers. Did I read Cecil's announcement wrong?

I tried getting one of the cards up and running, but the frontend hangs when I try to watch live TV. I think it is because I am not getting a good enough signal. What do I run to check the signal level? Is there a consolidated HOWTO out there that can guide me? I read some stuff in the MythTV docs, but it was for the Air2PC card. I am also not sure if I should be using /dev/video32 or /dev/dtv0.

Help, please.

Hardware:

Asus P4C800-E
1GB DDR
P4 3.0 Northwood
Nvidia GeForceFX 5200

This is the exact same problem I've been having. If anyone knows, I too would appreciate the help.

R5A12 does not have the 2.0 drivers R5A15.x does have the 2.0 drivers, and acts like dvb, so you don't use a device, you set it up as a dvb card. and then lots more stuff. I don't think anyone has written it all down yet. And unfortunately I don't think that there is really any utilities with the new drivers to see the signal strength.

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Xsecrets

Unfortunately I know nothing of this card, but don't you get the signal strength when you are scanning for channels when setting up the DVB channels?

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Girkers

Thanks for the info.

I'll probably get some time this weekend to try R5A15.1 with the dvb drivers (and Cecil's instructions in the announcements). I'll let you know what I find. In the meantime, if anyone is having success with this, please post some tips.

In particular, I am trying to receive OTA broadcasts.

I'm having "some" success. I believe my steps were as follows, kind of following this:

http://www.digitalregime.com/mythdvb/setup/

1: stop mythbackend (important! virtually not mentioned anywhere!)
2: run mythtv-setup
3: clear channels and capture cards
4: in Card Setup, set up HD3000 as a DVB card. It should recognize that you have a HD3000
5: in Video Source, create a name and download the OTA HD listings from Zap2It that you set up ahead of time (the URL above seems to imply this step is not necessary)
6: in Input Connection, connect Zap2It channel setup to DVB card (likewise, not sure this is necessary but I did it)
7: go into channel editor (is that the name?), do a full channel scan, get the channels that your card can receive (Note that the URL above says to create the ATSC channels first, then scan for just those channels. Might be a cleaner way of doing it.)
8: Now the fun part. Pretend to edit each listing from Zap2It (select the listing and press Enter) and jot down the XMLTVID number. Then enter that number in the ACTUAL channel that the card scanned. If you don't do this the programming info won't show up for the actual scanned channel
9: quit mythtv-setup
10: start mythbackend back up again
11: run mythfilldatabase, I guess

You can also do that xmlid modification via webmin if you have it running. There's also a script by Human that is attempting to automate this procedure.

Hope this is right... others can correct if not.

hmm interesting I didn't realize you could do #8 I ended up running mythfilldatabase and moving the xmlid's from the zap2it channels to the scanned channels and deleting the zap2it channels and running mythfilldatabase again. good to know you can eliminate a step there. One of these days someone will get this all scripted out so it's not such a tedious process.

At some point I'm going to have to actually spend some time and try to get qam working. now that's the fun one.

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Xsecrets

My pcHDTV 3000 is scheduled to arrive Monday so I'll be working with that all Monday night, Tuesday when I get home from work, Wednesday...

...until it's recording and I'm happilly watching hdtv.

My plan is to capture OTA broadcast with the hd-3000. I have also read that there may be a way to capture unencrypted digital cable broadcasts using the cable company issued line. I believe the card has the capability to do that, but I'm not sure if the software is ready to do that; I have to confirm that as I work with it more.

qam (unencrypted cable) support is in the drivers, unfortunately it seems like most cable companies strip the PLIP from the data stream, and mythtv will not enter the channels from the scan without this info. It should theoretically be possible to get it all working using other utilities and manual database editing, but looks to be quite a pain. I will be digging into this soon as the dvb drivers have been less than stellar for me. If I can make it work I will put up a detailed writeup for anyone who wishes to waste away a day of their life like I am going to do.

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Xsecrets

The HD3000 hardware is supposed to support NTSC (old fashioned analog TV) as well as ATSC (fancy new digital tv, including HDTV).
Is NTSC supposed to work with this card and MythTV?
When I tell it I've got a DVB card, it only says ATSC, so I don't know if it's trying NTSC at all. When I try a channel scan, it appears to only be trying QAM channels (that's digital, right?).

I've got "digital cable", where a bunch of channels are analog NTSC, a bunch are standard definition digital, and a handfull are HDTV (I get them all on my HDTV monitor and HDTV cable box from the cable co.).

Trying R5A15.1, R5A15, R5A12, I've yet to get anything but a black screen when I try to "Watch TV", and the "scan for channels" has never found a thing.

With R5A12 now, I get a black screen when I try to "Watch TV". When I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL in an attempt to get anything other than a black screen, I get "The connection to the master backend server has gone away for some reason."

There was one point where if I went to "phone", I would get a mediocre-quality picture in the left-hand video display. That's the only video I've managed to get, and never any audio.

Right now I'd be tickled just to get a few cheesy analog channels.

There are no digital off-the-air channels receivable in my area without an antenna that would make Arecibo look small.

I've tried various suggestions on this site, but nothing yet. Sigh.

Laramie

For all intents and purposes you can't do ntsc with the hd3000 quick answer.

long answer. it does support ntsc (water poor support) and that support doesn't work with the dvb drivers, so double wammy. I did tune some ntsc channels with the old drivers, and got nothing but funny shades of green.

If you don't get ota where you are you are in for a long trip. As I mentioned earlier I believe qam can be done if your channel scan locks onto some channels but doesn't add anything to the database, but at this point it will be ALOT of work.

for the standard ntsc part you'd be best off going and getting a pvr 150/250 to handle that.

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Xsecrets

Sigh. So my shiny new card is of no use to me, at least for the time being.
Okay, I'm throwing more money at the situation, and ordered a PVR-250.

I'll be moving to a more civilized area in a few weeks, where all of the major networks are supposedly either on-the-air (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX) or coming soon (PBS) as digital over-the-air broadcasters.

But, in theory, shouldn't the HD-3000 work for the digital cable channels? Or is the missing "PLIP" (what's a PLIP?) likely biting me?

I'm hoping the HD-3000 and PVR-250 will play together well with MythTV.

Laramie

The HD-3000 is only advertised to work with OTA (over-the-air) HDTV.

And if it happens to work with some cable systems, that's just luck (and subject to them reengineering their systems).

-brendan

yes pvr250 and hd3000 play fine together that's what's in my main system. the hd3000 itself will work fine with the unencrypted qam, however if you want to get anything into myth from qam you'll have to tell it exactly how to get it as the mythtv scan will not create a record in the channel table of the database if it can't find the PLIP info. Like I said at this point it will be a very long and arduous process, and I haven't even verified that it's possible, but by piecing together information from several mailing lists and a couple of wiki's and forums I belive I know mostly what the process will entail.

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Xsecrets

Well, I got my hd-3000 card a few days early so I'm working on it this weekend. Unfortunately for me my antenna won't be at my house until Monday, so in the meantime I'll have to deal with no antenna and speculation whether or not it works.