[mythtv-users] Upgrade Suggestions - currently on myth 0.21 with PVR150, 250, 350

David Reitz dreitz at catdevnull.com
Sun Jul 3 18:48:07 UTC 2011


On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 11:15 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com>wrote:

> On 7/2/2011 18:36, James Pifer wrote:
> > Good suggestion. I'm in Charlotte, NC in the US. Cable provider is Time
> > Warner. No set top boxes, basic cable. Only HD is tuned by digital
> > tuners in my TVs. It's "regular" coaxial connections and I assume atsc.
>
> If you're currently using analog cable, don't expect to be able to
> continue using that in the long term.  Cable providers are all switching
> over to digital to free up bandwidth for additional channels and
> internet.  Start planning an upgrade for your frontends to support HD.
> For digital broadcasts (ATSC) and unencrypted digital cable (clear QAM),
> you're looking at MPEG2 at up to 18Mbps.  Any desktop AMD64 or Core2, as
> well as most mobile processors of those architectures, should have
> plenty of power to handle that content.
>
> >>> Are there any low priced, non-PCI options for replacing my Hauppauge
> >>> cards?
>
> As a non-PCI replacement to those cards, you want to look into the
> HVR-2250.  It has two tuners that can either be used for digital or
> analog, an MPEG encoder for each, and uses a PCIe x1 slot.  The
> HVR-1800/1850 is also available, however there is a bug in the driver
> that prevents that card from being used for analog capture within MythTV.
>
> >>> I also run a pretty powerful xen server and I know I could put
> >>> mythbackend on there, but I can't use the PCI cards. I would have to
> >>> replace the tuner cards. I could pass through some USB ports.
>
> Unless you need to run multiple different operating systems
> simultaneously, or need to ensure complete isolation for testing or
> debugging purposes, it's best to avoid virtual machines and just run
> directly on the base system.
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In regards to your possible hardware problems, I would be VERY suspicious of
the Hauppauge PVR-350 card you have.  I had the PVR-350 in one MythTV system
and experienced random lockups, video corruption, etc.  After I took the
PVR-350 out of the system, all was well!  As it turns out, there are known
DMA bugs with certain Hauppauge cards (mine was one of them -- I don't
remember which specific cards were affected, but I'm sure you could find
this on the IVTV website and/or in the IVTV mailing list).  The IVTV drivers
do their absolute best to workaround the DMA bug, but it isn't perfect.
 There is definitely a chance you're experiencing the same issues I did.

Good luck,
David
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