[mythtv-users] UK, transports and a relief ... (was About to give up - Avermedia 771 - not sensitive enough for UK DVB?)

Paul Broadwith paul.broadwith at blueivy.co.uk
Wed Nov 14 17:37:34 UTC 2007


I thought I would give people an update on my situation with MythTV and
my Avermedia card that I posted about before.

I decided to buy myself a Haupauge Nova-T 500 card to try and get things
working and had exactly the same problems I had before with the
Avermedia cards (couldn't get some channels, poor reception on other
etc.).

After much faffing around I have managed to get all of the channels at a
decent level of reception which is a huge relief. I finally managed to
get BBC 1, 2 etc. today and I'll show how below.

The Avermedia cards used to report 90%+ reception and an S/N of 50%ish
on some channels. Now I have realised that the signal levels reported by
the Avermedia cards are nonsense. I did read that you can't trust the
signal quality reported by Hauppauge Nova-T cards, however I have to
dispute that. The signal quality I have now is around 60%-80% depending
on the channel. The S/N is always 0 (which puzzles me) however I know
that the Nova-T card has noise reduction built-in. Anyway, it now works.

I have been trying to get as many % out of the signals as I can. Redoing
the connection between the cable running downstairs and the aerial
actually increased the signal by about 7% and shortening the cable
between the wall and the MythTV machine increased it by 2% (the cable
was about 5m and coiled up on the floor - I replaced this with a 1m
cable to get the increase). I also spent some time in the loft (I have a
loft aerial) with a set top aerial, the MythTV box and a monitor to find
out where the best signal was. Because I have a watertank slap bang in
the middle of the loft I am limited as to where I can put the aerial.

Finally, the biggest problem I had was that I could not pick up BBC 1
etc. I managed this this afternoon using the ukfree.tv website. I looked
at the Transports in the Transport Editor for the UK. The first entry
was 562Mhz (I think it was 562). I looked at my transmitter here and
it's broadcasting the signals in 530Mhz for BBC 1 etc. I change to the
first transport and I picked up all of the channels immediately. My wife
was adamant that this was working so she could watch Strictly Come
Dancing on Saturday so you can see I was under pressure. My local
transmitter is Rumster Forest so anybody in the same area needs to
change MythTV.

A tip for anybody who like me wasn't sure about the transport settings -
go to ukfree.tv website and get your transmitter up and find out the
frequency it is broadcasting channels on and make sure they match the
entries in the Transport Editor. If they don't it's not going to find
them so change them.

I hope this helps somebody out there in the UK. The only thing that
doesn't work is MythWeather but I know that is broken. I use MythDora
and don't want to start changing too much in case it breaks something
else so I'm going to leave that.

Now that I have MythTV up and running I am amazed how incredibly it
really is. Yesterday, by accident, I discovered streaming Live TV across
the wireless network to my laptop. Okay I was only 3 feet from the TV,
but it was the ability to do it that amazed me.

Finally, I am using the glass-wide theme which is excellent, however
when going into 'Watch TV' the tuner being used is displayed on the
screen. It overwrites the area of the screen where the channel is being
displayed and looks bad. Any way to turn this off?

Kind regards,

Paul

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