On Apr 22, 2005, at 2:06 AM, Henri Yandell wimped out: > Me neither :) I bought the fancy Hauppage TV card (PVR-350) and after > a lot of work got it to work in Windows, and gave up in Linux when I > realised I had to install kernel modules from source. That's been a > sign for me over the years that something is too much effort. > > I saw somebody recommending the PVR-250 card (no TV out) and a > separate video card with a TV/out, and I've got to agree with them.
I don't know where you've been reading, but nothing extreme has to be done to get the PVR-350 working with Myth. Mine works wonderfully. The simplest approach is to download the KnoppMyth [1] install CD image. It's a complete MythTV installer on one CD that's pretty easy. If you have more or less standard hardware, you can have a MythTV setup running in under an hour. KnoppMyth is actually a stripped-down Debian Linux distribution tweaked for Myth. Another, more flexible, but slightly more difficult, way to go is to use apt or yum to grab all the install files into a standard Linux distribution. For example, with Fedora, there's a complete step-by-step installer tutorial at the Myth(TV)ology site. All the Myth software is installed with the command "apt-get install mythtv-suite". This puts about 80 packages on your machine, and with standard hardware, configuration takes a couple of hours. There's a lot of support for the PVR-350 all through the site. When I set up the Linux machine in my basement office to run the front end, I did the apt-get method because it was already running Fedora. I had it running in under an hour, with no compiling, using the back end on the main Myth machine in the family room upstairs. I can be downstairs watching my baseball while the kids are upstairs watching their -- whatever -- at the same time off the same back end. An added bonus to this was that the cheap BT848 TV tuner card in the downstairs machine was automatically detected by the back end upstairs, and it can now be used for recording programs by the upstairs back end, giving the system three tuner cards. (That surprised me.) The upstairs machine has a PVR-350 and a PVR-250. Basically, the look, feel and capabilities of either front end are identical. Whether downstairs or upstairs I can schedule, delete, watch and burn recordings to DVD. I can also play DVDs and CDs and rip them to the hard drive. > >> "Mythers had the front end running on the Mac mini, and by most >> accounts, it makes a fine front end machine, as long as you don't >> expect it to drive a high definition television". > > Installs very nicely, there's a nice simple .dmg file. Bad side is > that the Myth front end requires a Myth back end elsewhere (or seems > to), so you can't just dump video somewhere on your network. You can run both back end and front end on the same machine. That's what I'm doing with the upstairs machine. The problem with the mini is that there is no back end for the machine (yet). A lot of the problem with getting the back end running is the proprietary hardware in the tuners. [1] <http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html> [2] <http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php> | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be April 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
