I'm a newbie to this and my understanding is that MythTV supports the HD2000 & HD3000 cards, but they are no longer available through pcHDTV. Their new card is HD5500 (which has a different tuner chip made by LG I think) and I do not see any and verbage about MythTV supporting that card!!

Anyone know or have tried the HD5500 w/MythTV???

That cards is so new, not even I had heard about it. MythTV doesn't really care about the card. Whatever card you want to use, it must be support by the modules (drivers). In this case, DVB... The best place to find out, would be the DVB mailing list (linuxtv.org).

Should work well. FWIW, it's looks to be the same HD tuner that the Air2PC 5000 uses.
I have one of each - and I don't know if it's a fluke or what, but out of 4 DTV/HD stations that I get, one receives much better on the 3000, and one receives much better on the 5000. I've tweaked the channels so that neither card sees the one that it doesn't receive well anymore.

Just an f.y.i. from the pcHDTV.com description of the card...



Hope this helps.

Mark

MythTV supports it, but it looks like at the moment Knoppmyth does not. It kind of shows up, but you wont get any reception.

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From the pchdtv download page


I don't know much about how all the different things work, but I would (and again, I'm uneducated on this) suspect that since it went from a firmware that is downloaded to the card every time, to a card that interfaces with the system through a driver, then it will take at least some small changes to (as Cecil said) DVB before it will be working smoothly.

As an aside here, the card is around $130 now, supposedly because the new (5th) generation tuner from LG that the card uses is cheaper.

Can you explain this a bit further? How do you have the pcHDTV 5500 hooked up? I'm planning to get signal to it via an S-video cable from my Dish HD receiver ... or won't this work? That's how I have it configured now with a PVR-150 card and it works fine (albeit in SD!).

Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks.

You can't send an HD signal via S-video.

More generally, there is basically no way to record an HD signal from a satellite set-top box.

The HD5500 can only record over-the-air HD signals from your local stations, or record unscrambled HD channels from a cable TV connection (i.e. QAM).

Thanks for the reply. That clearly answers the question! I guess I'll wait until a more flexible HD capture card comes along then. Or just get an HD DVR.

I love my MythTV but quite honestly, with satellite service, it's going to be hard to implement as a DVR. But everything else we use it for is great (viewing digital pics, watching videos and listening to music).

Thanks again!

Yeah, satellite is a particular problem. At least with a cable box you can ask for one with a firewire output, which MAY work with Myth and allow you to record at least SOME stations. But with sat tv you're basically screwed. May sat tv companies burn in hell... greedy b@stards.

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I originally thought the card wasn't working because a Comcast employee claimed they had unencrypted HD signal over standard cable. Apparently that guy was just making that up as there is no HD signal.

I am having weird issues with the HD5500 and my PVR250. With both cards installed in my computer the Tuner on the PVR250 is disabled. The composite inputs still show up, but not the tuner. It's not the greatest situation since I really wanted to use both.

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Man, I hear you!!! I don't want to take this too far off topic but couldn't resist. We live out in the country and although we do have cable as an option, and did in fact have it for many years, once we got an HDTV, it was time to go satellite. Our cable company (US Cable) still doesn't have digital cable available in our area so no HD there. So satellite is the only game in town. But I do agree, they are greedy b@stards. But it gets worse, the only broadband option I have is DSL. I'm thankful for that but it's EXPENSIVE! $50/month. Now, our beloved phone company (Frontier) decides to 'bundle' sat TV so now we get Dish Network, DSL and phone service all in one ... but at a price ... $175+/month! And that's just for the basic phone services and the middle sat TV package (160 channels, no premium channels). Damn!!! Well, actually, they screw you even more because you can't just get the basics, they claim just the basics would cost more than them throwing in all the other crap (voice mail, call waiting, 300 minutes of long distance, yada-yada-yada).

OK, rant off. I manage to get good standard def. recordings with my PVR-250 from the HD sat box via S-video .... But as you've indicated, HD recordings are not possible at the moment from a sat box.

Thanks for listening!

Keep in mind that it may never be possible to do so with MythTV.

Right now, the only way it would be possible is to record the HD component signal. There are cards out there that can capture this signal uncompressed via component, but they're expensive, probably don't have Linux drivers, and need to save as uncompressed HD, taking up a sweet 8.8 GB per MINUTE ( per http://www.avid.com/community/toolbox/f ... erence.asp )

There may be cards down the road that will compress the analog HD signal on-the-fly, just like the Hauppauge cards encode analog inputs to SD MPEG2 on-the-fly, but then the satellite companies may down-rez the analog outputs to close this infamous "analog hole." That's why upsampling DVD players only allow upsampled output via HDMI, not via analog component.

Plus, the satellite companies (just like the cable companies) want to sell you their own DVR solution, so they have no incentive to make it easier to use your own.

Interesting. Thanks for the technical details. It's sort of what I expected to hear but now you've confirmed it. Re: the 8.8GB, the table near the bottom of that link shows :60 so I'm assuming that means per minute? Regardless, it's a MASSIVE amount of data! I'll keep an eye on the Hauppauge cards as they will probably be first to market with something like this. I'm surprised they don't have an HD caputure card yet?

Thanks!

You're welcome, and thanks for finding my mistake, I've corrected my post accordingly so that it's 8.8GB/min, not per second.