I have had great trouble finding any how-to's that don't assume that I have an internet connection. DSL/Cable internet is not available where I live. Dialup never seems to be mentioned as an option (I'm not too interested anyway as there are no phone jacks in the living room.)

All I want to do is manually set recording times for my favorite shows and watch them at my leisure, and occasionally watch live TV. A channel guide would be cool, but seems to be totally impractical.

So far I cannot figure out how to do this, and the hangup appears to be the Video Sources configuration. I have scanned for channels, and they have been found, however when I try to watch live TV, it tells me that none are available.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I would also like to suggest (is there a better place than the fourms for suggestions?) that an "offline" option be added to the setup, and the default font size for the terminal be increased by several points, (it's nearly impossible to read on a TV screen.)

thanks,
zoe

Hi,
You can do the setup with out internet connection. I would assume you have more than one computer so you will want to still set up the network so you can go machine to machine, use windows with vlc to watch recordings, putty to tweak things and etc.

The key is to set yourself up with the proper tools. Do the alt s and go down the list in steps 1,2,3,5,4
browse through general
I set capture card
set up two sources, Video and RF you will want broadcast (OTA?)
set up the channels manually
not knowing where you are things may have to deviate ..
I set for ntsc, video, no commercials,Video, channel 1,Video
on page two I set the freq to1
Then I go back and add the RF entries
I set for ntsc, RF,commercials,RF, channel 3, RF and on page two add the matching freq by channel number
You should be able to add all you need / want. The only short coming is that you will have no EPG and therefore can not press R to go in to a hot record.
Once you have channels, do step 4 and marry video to composite (1) and rf to tuner default to favorite channel #.

You can still schedule a manual controlled record session, if you want 7 days, set the start day to a previous Saturday else it will only schedule weekdays / weekends. Works very well via the mythweb access.
See if that will work for you. If you are using R5A series, there is a way to get a live hot record R key.

Mike

for some reason I never stumble across the solutions to my tech problems until just after I've made a ridiculous ignorant post to a message board...

it seems that I failed to run mythfilldatabase after completing the backend setup. To my credit, the message telling me to do so was too small to be seen when setting up with a TV as a display.

Hi,

I am confused, mythfilldatabase requires an internet connection and a zap2it account.. How did running it help?

Mike

mjl: perhapts it didn't help at all, but one way or another this problem seems to be resolved.