I have been trying to get the first rev (R0.2) Air2PC card working on my box at home, not for HD but for digital OTA reception. This documents my steps taken so far and where I am stuck at.

Hardware:
Intel Pentium D 3.06GHz (Prescott)
Aopen AX4C Max II
512MB PC3200 DDR
G-Force FX 5200 128MB
Air2PC R0.2
300GB Seagate HDD
LG 3162B DVD/RW (I think)
Silverstone LC04 Case

My configuration has the computer connected only to a television with an s-video cable. That's why my eyes are sore

Here we go:

** Do not start with the Air2PC card installed, my experience is that the system has late revision card support and will hang during card init. **

Boot from Knoppmyth CD
At Boot: prompt type tv <enter>
If hangs at accessing cdrom, could be a dma issue. I tried a newer CDROM drive and it just worked.
Install, then reboot.
When screen goes blank, press CTRL-ALT-F1
Login as root, enter password



When kernel complete, will load gdm
Finish Myth install, exit from setup, then exit from frontend
reboot
ctrl-alt-f1
Get necessary files. untar and patch:



Now, let's configure the kernel:



Make changes to DVB settings (forgot exact path)
exit menuconfig and save .config file



Press i to insert, copy (line-by-line) existing kernel pointer entries, change to point to yours (look in /boot), uncomment the prompt and timeout entries (read comments), then <esc> :wq to exit.



should show both entries with an * next to the default. You can change this to your kernel later.

Now we need to download the DVB kernel to get our firmware file.



Reboot, select your kernel at LILO, verify that your kernel boots and doesn't crash miserably. You will probably have to reinstall the video drivers again:

When screen goes blank, press CTRL-ALT-F1
Login as root, enter password



Halt, install Air2PC card, reboot.

You should see the card init during boot (it still says that Mythtv didn't find any multimedia cards, though).

Stop Myth backend



Re-run mythtv-setup (alt+s), configure card as per DVB procedure documented elsewhere (sorry), scan for channels. Exit.

Start Myth backend



Start frontend (alt+m), watch clear digital channels! (not quite) This is where I get hung up. The backend log keeps posting that it has not heard from the card in the last second and there is no audio/video.

Anybody have any ideas why this may be happening? I currently have two leads:

1. Need to manually edit PID information in channels.conf file?
2. Need to add USING_DVB in settings.pro file?

Any help would be appreciated, I will update this post as I progress. Sorry it gets a little obscure at the end, it was getting late and I am posting from work.

Thanks,

Shawn

Thanks for sharing this. Any success? I just picked up a 0.2 card and hope to try it out one of these weekends.

Here's a related thread at MythTV-Users:
http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/142054?

Maiku,

I am at a precipice right now with my installation efforts. I was looking at some options for how to proceed and it seemed like wherever I was going to go I would at least have to rebuild MythTV. Since I couldn't find anywhere that stated the intricacies of doing such within the Knoppmyth framework, I am hesitant to do that. Rebuilding the kernel seemed simpler since I already had the .config file from the first build.

As a hail-mary the other night, I went in and changed the card mode from PS to TS and I actually got a picture. Problem was that whenever I changed the default channel to a known good channel, the channel setting would always disappear and then the frontend wouldn't come up again (I think this has been fixed in CVS). Also, the video was choppy and I didn't even get to the point of troubleshooting the sound. I do not have HD but I guess the increased bandwidth of either the HD/SD signal OR the decoding of it for output to my device OR the transport stream setting is too much for my system to handle all at once. And I do have a 3.06G Celeron, but it can't be that much worse than a full-up P4. Ok, maybe it can.

I think my next step is to try to build from scratch on a Mandrake 10.2 system. Then I can get the latest kernel, the latest CVS of MythTV and work from there. Not that it's a better dist than debian, just one that I am more familiar with.

Shawn

_________________
Aopen AX4C Max II
Intel Celeron 3.06GHz / 512MB DDR
Seagate 300GB HDD
MSI G-Force FX 5200 / Air2PC R0.2
Silverstone LC04 case

Shawn you say the video was choppy (which i think is to be expected on a celeron, from what I understand, using software decoding)... have you tried XvMC? I know you've still got channel issues, but I'd be curious to know the video performance, assuming you can get it to display w/XvMC.

I gave it a try using your directions and got about as far as you did -- audio and video that plays very slowly and skips a lot. I didn't have to change from PS to TS to get that far, although I did run into some /dev/dvb/adapter0 permission problems.

With CPU usage up around 90% I'm guessing my system just isn't up to the task. (XP 2600+, 512MB RAM) I've read that a P4 2.8-3.0GHz CPU is generally recommended for HD. As CharlesV mentioned, some people seem to have success with lesser CPUs and XvMC enabled so I'll probably try swapping in my FX5200 card next.

I'm not really up on HD, but have you noticed that the Windows viewer app plays without stuttering?

UPDATE: Very smooth audio/video with XvMC enabled. CPU usage for mythfrontend dropped to 45-50%. The system did crash a couple of times, not sure if that's because of XvMC or my $10 indoor antenna...

It works!!!

I got my Air2PC rev0.2 card up and running using a kernel compiled from Shawn's instructions. The biggest issue with this card is definitely its weak tuner. Get yourself a good power-amplified antenna to use with this one. (Can anyone point me to a good recommendations thread?)

If you're getting a blank screen for 15 sec when you "Watch TV" and then it dumps you back to the menu, you could be defaulting a channel that is too weak or non-existant (such as default channel 3). You can verify that this is the problem by looking in your mythbackend.log file at /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log. If you see this:

Then you need to change your default channel for the Air2PC card:

• halt your mythbackend (e.g. /etc/init.d/mythbackend stop)
• run mythtv-setup (might need to do this as root; not sure)
• select 4. Input connections and setup DVBInput ([DVB : 0 ] in my case)
• while setting up DVBInput, change the Starting channel to something with a strong signal. If you don't know one off-hand, procede to the next step and come back to this later...
• select 5. Channel Editor and scan for new channels for [ DVB : 0 ]. If you need to, try and take note of at least one channel that gets a strong lock (this isn't as easy as it sounds, as most of the lock messages are blocked from view)
• restart mythbackend and mythfrontend

Once I got that set up, it ran beautifully! I'm watching HDTV on an OLD Athlon XP 1800+ (we're talkin' old-school 266MHz fsb here!) and a GeForce FX 5600 video card, XvMC enabled. It actually handles HD better than Cable! I think the video card is more important here than the CPU.

One final note: it took me a while to figure out exactly what format to enter the channel in for HD. What I discovered was that it expects it in the format of [channel][subchannel], all run together with no punctuation. i.e., 71 for Channel 7, subchannel 1 or 522 for channel 52, subchannel 2.

With any luck, we can get these drivers compiled into the next release of KnoppMyth!

- Stealth Dave

oh sweeeeeet

I haven't got my backend built yet, but hopefully when I get my next paycheck I can grab some stuff and toss something together with these 2 r0.2 cards and a sempron motherboard deal from fry's

I ran into a lot of problems with the Mandrake install so I reinstalled a fresh copy of Knoppmyth and updated the kernel to 2.6.13-rc6. Things seem to be going pretty well except for a few problems that are off-topic here and I have to search for some answers. I have XvMC enabled and it seems to work pretty well except some minor complaints:

- Video choppy when OSD is displayed.
- Channels take a long time to change.
- Still having problems with default channel when the system is rebooted.
- Some HD content still has choppy audio.
- The channel scan didn't find all my local channels (ie. PBS) so I will have to enter them manualy or adjust my antenna and rescan. I know that they were picked up when I ran the card under WinXP.
- Not sure how to check my system performance during watching / recording / etc. I can see the load averages but don't know exactly what they mean and you have to leave watching to check that.

Shawn

_________________
Aopen AX4C Max II
Intel Celeron 3.06GHz / 512MB DDR
Seagate 300GB HDD
MSI G-Force FX 5200 / Air2PC R0.2
Silverstone LC04 case

I got an Air2PC r0.2 from Ebay too. I followed Shawn's steps and it works!

I also had startup channel problem and couldn't fix it. I traced down to the source code and found one of the SQL statement couldn't read the value from table. I ended up modifying the code and it worked after modification. I think it might be my QT being too old and has this bug. I am using RedHat 9 but kernel upgraded to 2.6.12.

The startup channel value in the table sometimes get erased. But I haven't found the steps to reproduce it.

One of the issue I had was I used PS mode initially. Then some recordings loss audio half way while video is still perfect. I did some search and found soembody said using TS mode. This fixed the audio problem.

The issue I still have is with gnome. After some playback, "X" and "gnome-panel" start to use 100% CPU. It seems to be related switching screen resolution when playing SDTV (I switched to non-interlaced mode when playing SD, to workaround XV quality bug in NVidia driver). I have to kill X and restart again to fix it.

Thanks for the reply nonpro. I'm ashamed to admit that I am kinda waiting for MythTV 0.19 to arrive. Seems slow but I know they are working on it.

Maybe if I get some time I will see what I can do. I never got it 'Wife-Stable'.

Shawn

_________________
Aopen AX4C Max II
Intel Celeron 3.06GHz / 512MB DDR
Seagate 300GB HDD
MSI G-Force FX 5200 / Air2PC R0.2
Silverstone LC04 case

It looks like the new kernels have the frontend already in now so all you need is a new kernel, the firmware and the dvb-apps.

Living where I do (within 8 miles of TV Towers) it's working real well.

This is a mythtv complex which was already set up for high def and it's in a slave backend by itself.

By using Shawn's instructions, I was also able to get the Air2PC-ATSC-PCI (R0.2) working.
This is still a work in progress, however I wanted to share a couple of things I had to modify to get it working.
First:

I changed this to read since I'm using R5A30.1 and the kernel is already 2.6.13
EDIT: I had to download the .../DVB-2.6.13.patch.bz2, unzip the file and repack it as a .gz file. If anyone needs this, PM me and I can give you the file or a link to download

Next:

I had to change it to read:


I also should note that R5A30.1 already includes sufficient nVidia drivers so I didn't need to update those.

I am successfully recording via OTA digital. VERY good quality.

I'm having a problem with the channels. I have my subscription to zap2it and mythfilldatabase runs great, however I can do the 'scan for channels' within the channel editor and it successfully finds different (renamed) channels. So when mythfilldatabase runs, it's not updating the channels it actually scanned for.
ie. scan finds WPTA-HD (211); whereas mythfilldatabase finds WPTADT (21_1)

Any help would be great and I'll keep posting back if I figure anything out.

[UPDATE] I found if I ran both the dvbscan and mythfilldatabase I have duplicate channels in the 'channel editor' I then went into the mythweb interface to the setup and hid the channels that dvbscan found and changed the mythfilldatabase channel numbers to the scan numbers. I tried it with each individually and it didn't work. (not trying to hijack the thread, let me know if I need to start a new one about this)