To save some future pain for some people I wanted to make some notes for making KnoppMyth work with the HD-3000. The machine is a 1 GHz AMD chip, 60G hard drive, and 256MB of memory.

Even though KnoppMyth recognizes the card and chooses the driver correctly(cx88) I found that I needed to install the software that came on the disk with the card.

Compile and install the FedoraCore2.6 drivers. You may get a message saying /lib/modules/2.6.9-chw-4/build file or directory does not exist. I fixed this by gunziping and untaring the kernel src in /usr/src/.

Then compile xine-hd-lib and xine-hd-ui as directed in the README on the cd.

XvMC (Xvideo *static*) didn't show up after I ran ./configure but Xv (Xvideo *static*) did show up so I went ahead.

After that I could record fine and playback if xine was running in the background. If you don't have a sufficent signal for the channel you're trying to record mythtv doesn't seem to handle gracefully, if you get errors recording this may be the cause.

If anyone knows how to help with a couple nagging issues I'd appreciate it:

1 - Mythfrontend crashes with "segmentation fault" if I try to playback HDTV without having xine running in the background.

2 - When I add my WinTV card with the bt878 chipset to the system all my input connections for /dev/dtv dissappear.

3 - If the signal level is too low recording aborts - which is fine except that the file isn't actually recorded and can't be deleted from mythfrontend because the file doesn't exist.

1) no clue I've never had to do any of the stuff you just mentioned it always just worked, and I never run xine.

2) As far as I can tell pchdtv3000+v4lcard=broken. I never was able to get my leadtek card and the 3000 to play nice together, though I did not loose my dtv devices I just got a green screen.

3) This is a known bug. you can search the forums for nasty temporary hack fixes. basically dig through the data base touch a file with the name it's supposed to be then delete it. I believe it is supposed to be fixed in 0.18

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Xsecrets

You have a ONE GHz Athlon chip??? This is SERIOUSLY underpowered for viewing HDTV. You should be able to use this for a backend, but forget about using it for a frontend. XvMC, despite the best attempts, still isn't reliable enough to actually use for playing back HDTV. It's still in development and progress is finally being made by the devs. I predict by 0.19 it will actually be functional. Maybe.

You should be looking at a fairly hefty P4 for frontend duty until XvMC actually works.

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It would work better on a faster machine, I'm kind of surprised it worked at all on this one.

I think the needs for a P4 3.0 GHz processor are exaggerated. I am running a frontend/backend with a 3000+ and a frontend only with a 2500+ I've tried less (1700+) and found that I couldn't watch 1080i streams without jerkyness, but 720p streams played fine. The caveat is I only watch recorded programs rather than live tv. I'm not sure why live tv is jerky and playback of a recorded stream is fine (fine even when I am watching it while recording it)

I also did not need to do anything to get the HD-3000 to work. R5A12 worked out of the box.

3) Yeah I get the aborted recordings with 0 file length. I just pull up the recorded programs on mythweb, look at the tail end of the mythbackend.log and touch the file that says doesn't exist. Then you can delete the file. I'm not at all impressed with the way HDTV degrades. I live within 7 miles of the tower and have a clear line of sight to my hdtv antenna on the roof. (a few tress in the way). I can get 100% signal in dtvsignal and still have problems. I think people are going to be pissed when HDTV is mantditory, unless they can come up with a way to make the signal degrade more gracefully, like have a packet be grey or even the color of the last good packet, rather than rainbow colors.

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FRONTEND 1 - R5A16, Athlon 3000+, NVidia Motherboard, SB live, GeForce 5200, AA 9A60
FRONTEND 2 - R5A16, Athlon 2500+, Nvidia Motherboard, SB Live, GeForce 440MX, TV-OUT
BACKEND - R5A16, Althon 1700+, Nvidia MB, 2- HD3000's, 450GB LVM partition

From my experience 3.0Ghz is a bit high, but I don't think 1 Ghz is going to cut it.

My P4 3.0 Ghz sits around 30% or less when playing back HD. I would bet that a 2.8 or 2.6 HT P4 would be fine. My barton XP2500 would be at at least 70-75% with XV when playing back recorded HD. It couldn't seem to handle live tv without enabling XvMC which has its own bag of problems. My guess is a lot of your problems are from using a machine not quite up to the task.

My HD-3000 has always just worked with r5a12.

I don't have experience with the HD-3000 and a bt878 card in the same machine. I do have the HD-3000 in a master backend and a leadtek tv2000xp deluxe in a slave backend and that works fine.