Connecting Tuner Card To Cable Sat
Now that the Myth box is finished, how do I connect it to my Cable, DirectTV, dish or satllite provider? How do I change channels and how does Myth know how to change channels?
There are several ways to connect to your TV provider and HOWTO articles scattered about. This is a page to tie them together. The user manual barely touches upon this important subject, I hope someone will link here or get started there.
Several Ways
There are several ways to connect to cable and satllite.
1. Firewire. MythTV supports a Firewire connection to your cable or Satllite box. Over firewire Myth knows how to change and tune channels. In this configuation you don't need a tuner card. However you will only get certain channels -- not all. Your cable box or satllite box needs to have a working Firewire port.
2. Direct coax. Tuner cards have a coax connector and you plug the coax from the wall directly into the tuner card. The tuner card knows how to change channels and Myth uses an API to the card to request channel changes. If your TV requires a cable or satellite box, you probably will not be able to get all channels directly from the wire. If you use a cable ready TV and you currently plug directly into it from the wall, then a splitter and this method is all you need.
3. Coax from the STB (Set top box) to the tuner card. This connection means that your STB can unencrypt the signal, and any station you can get on your STB you can get on your card. However, in this siutation, Myth does not know how to change channels on your STB. You need to add an ir blaster device which Myth will use to change the channels on the box.
4. Svideo/composite/RCA cables from the STB to the tuner card. Like number 3 above. However, you will need an audio in on your tuner card as wll as an Svideo in (or composite). Your STB should support these connections. In this setup, you will need also need an IR blaster and channel change script so that Myth can change the channel on the STB.
How Myth sees these
The Input connections choices in mythtvsetup are shown below. Note that my PVR 250 (MPEG : /dev/video1) has several input connections I can use, including Tuner 1 (coax in) and Svideo 1 and Composite 1.
In the MythTv setup program (mythtvsetup) you define Tuner cards and Input connections. The inputs are the different ways you can connect to your card, such as the coax port (tuner), the composite or svideo port (combined with audio in). On a single card such as the Happpauge PVR 250, you can use both cable in and svideo in, not at the same time though.
Additionaly Myth has you define 'Video Sources' which in the US are connected to Data Direct or Zap2It Labs channel lineups. You connect the Input sou
