OK, I have got this thing running perfectly - after many many hours and attempts!

This card has a different encoder (iCTV16) and tuner (Microtune 4049 FM5) chip to the "gold standard" pvr-250's. This meant that KnoppMyth would hang on boot due to the first, and when that is fixed wouldn't tune due to the second. I went through all this with KnoppMyth R4V2.

There are plenty of ivtv patches to 0.1.9 to get around the iCTV16 issue, and it is also fixed in ivtv-0.1.10-pre2.

bttv 0.9.x supports the Microtune tuner chip.

To get it all working, I first upgraded to R4V3. Then I obtained the latest patched ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-65c and bttv-0.9.15.

Once these are installed, in the right order, it all worked.

Here is the step-by-step I used:

1) Download KnoppMyth R4V3 iso and burn a CD.
2) Remove any PVR-x50 cards with iCTV16 encoders from system.
3) Boot KnoppMyth CD and select auto-install.
4) Once system is installed, allow to reboot.
5) Breeze through the install instructions. Once you get to the setup gui exit by pressing esc. MythTV itself will start next. Exit by pressing esc.
5) Open up a console window by clicking on the desktop and selecting XTerm.
6) Use wget to download ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-ck and bttv-0.9.15 (or later if stable). Unpack them into current directory.
wget http://dl.bytesex.org/releases/video4li ... .15.tar.gz
tar xvfz bttv-0.9.15.tar.gz
wget http://kmos.org/~ckennedy/ivtv/ivtv-0.1 ... 2-ck65.tgz
tar xvfz ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-ck65.tgz
7) Unpack the kernel sources
su
cd /usr/src
bzcat linux-2.4.25-chw.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -
copy build config to kernel source tree and fix the /usr/src/linux symlink to point to the unpacked kernel source
cp linux/.config linux-2.4.25-chw
rm linux
ln -s linux-2.4.25-chw linux
cd linux-2.4.25-chw
make oldconfig dep
9) exit su session back to mythtv session
ctrl-D
cd
10) compile the bttv and ivtv code
cd bttv-0.9.15
su
make
ctrl-D
cd
cd ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-ck65/driver
make
cd ../utils
make
11) Install the ivtv then the bttv kernel modules
cd
su
cd bttv-0.9.15
make install
cd ../ivtv-0.1.10-pre2-ck65/driver
make install
cd ../utils
make install
ctrl-D
12) edit /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv
alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c
options ivtv ivtv_debug=1 cardtype=2 tda9887=1
options tuner type=45
options tda9887
options msp3400 once=1 simple=1
add below ivtv msp3400 saa7115 tuner tda9887
add above ivtv lirc_dev lirc_i2c
post-install ivtv /usr/local/bin/test_ioctl -u 0xff -p 4 -f width=720,height=576
13) Shutdown linux
shutdown now
14) Install PVR-x50 card
15) Reboot
16) Setup MythTV channels etc.
17) Enjoy!

Hope that helps someone else!

Thanks to innumerable people for giving me advice, in particular to Ces & Dale - I would not want to have undertaken this without KnoppMyth as a starting point!

Cheers,
JohnO

Help!
I have 3 of these pvr250's. I was able to run through your guide successfully, but still unable to bring up any video. Since I have three cards, would I need to do anything differently when editing edit /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv? Please help as I have been laboring over these cards for a while and still am unable to get it working........

So what do you get - static?

Have you successfully run mythfilldatabase to setup all your channel definitions and made sure all channels are associated with a video source?

What country are you in?

I would try with just one card first.

Cheers,
JohnO

I'm in the us. I get nothing. Just a blank screen. When I try to run mythfilldatabase I get errors "unretry-able error reading schedule". Also, when I run mythtv-setup there isn't anything listed in the input connections menu, which leads me to believe that it isn't seeing any cards at all.....

you have to fix xmltv there is a sticky post in the linux mythtv section of the forums on how to do this.

You better not have the PAL format card (model 32559) then! In which case you probably don't have the tuner issues I had. I expect if you insmod tveeprom then dmesg | tail you will see that it has recognised your tuner. If so you can pretty much ignore all I said and just search this forum for MCE OEM patch and you should find a small ivtv patch to get you around the card type issue. Either that or get the latest ivtv as I have. But don't worry about bttv.

Ohm and as others have said, you need to update your xmltv as the source format of the listings has changed.

oops....I mistakenly read the title as 32552, the Amity card. Thanks for the heads up on xmltv!