User:Peteforsyth

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I'm Pete. As of May 2011, I've been trying to set up a Mythbuntu system with a Hauppauge PVR-150 to work with Comcast digital cable. I got pretty far, with the generous help of some folks on the #mythtv-users IRC channel; but was stymied first by the need to set up LIRC to control the TV tuner in the cable box, and then by a setup that stopped working and started giving me Error 139 (segmentation faults) when launching the front end.

At this point I'm thinking that MythTV might just be beyond me! I'm thinking about wiping the drive and starting over, getting a digital card and just working with broadcast TV instead of Comcast, which I believe would eliminate the need to set up LIRC.

What I did

In October 2010, I set up Mythbuntu 10.11 on a Dell Optiplex. I initially had a framegrabber, but was advised that it was going to be a disappointing uphill battle to work with that. So I got a PVR-150 (which has a remote and IR blaster) and also a PVR-500 (which I haven't really done much with).

In May 2011, I upgraded to Mythbuntu 11.04 and gave it another shot. With a great deal of help, I was able to get the PVR-150 up and running; I set up a schedulesdirect.org account, and linked it up; but I had to change channels with the cable remote (I used /bin/true for the channel-changing script). I watched some TV through it, and was able to pause live TV and make recordings.

I would have continued, but somehow I managed to screw up the installation and have been unable to get it working again. I believe all the settings are correct, but when I start MythFrontend, I either get an "error 139" and the program crashes, or else I get the error "MythTV is using all inputs, but there are no active recordings?"

Things to try

To get MythTV working

  • There is a suggestion at Talk:Hauppauge PVR-150 that may address the IR setup issue I was having. I don't believe I tried this; it's the hardware.conf file that was causing problems, so it looks promising.
  • Read up more at lirc.org

Less ambitious projects

Now that I've learned what a big task it is to get MythTV up and running, I'm thinking about less ambitious approaches that would still enable me to record television. (Sacrificing the automatic stuff you get from MythTV.) Simply having a digital recorder that grabs a stream from my cable box, on demand..maybe with the option to schedule ahead of time..would be very useful indeed, and maybe there's an easier way to set this up with lighter-weight software.

Here's a list of relevant programs: http://www.exploits.org/v4l/