I am planning a MythTV System and want to build it with two Hauppauge PVR cards one for each of two DirecTV boxes so I can record two streams or watch while recording, etc. My RCA DirecTv boxes have serial ports so I think I can control them with serial cables.

My question is if my Mobo has one serial port can I use a usb to serial adapter for the second box? If not what should I do? Is serial control superior to IR blasters? It seems like it should be.

I didn't find an answer to this exact question in the forum and apologize if I have missed it.

I bought a dual serial port card off ebay, that worked well for me.

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I too added a dual serial port card and it works great. I think it was under $20 new. I did have to do a little tweaking to get it to detect right though. Here's the command I used if you should happen to need it:

I ordered a serial card with my mobo and other stuff. I will give it a try. Did you guys make your own cables or buy the snapstream ones. I think I can use some DB9 cables and some handset cable from an old phone.

I made my own using an old phone cord from a handset if I remember correctly. I think the standard phone cord does not fit the opening, but the curly handset ones do. You should be able to find the pinout pretty easily too.

I've got curly cords with electrical tape hanging out of the back of mine.

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I am finally tryng to get a second box working. The first one works ok with my homemade cables. I can't get the second one to work using the Netmos serial card.

Bus 1, device 8, function 0:
Serial controller: PCI device 9710:1835 (NetMos Technology) (rev 1).
IRQ 21.
Master Capable. Latency=32.
I/O at 0x9000 [0x9007].
I/O at 0x9400 [0x9407].
I/O at 0x9800 [0x9807].
I/O at 0x9c00 [0x9c07].
I/O at 0xa000 [0xa007].
I/O at 0xa400 [0xa40f].

I don't know anything about serial ports but have been trying different setserial commands but I keep getting an input output error when I run the script on any port except ttyS0.

I tried:

This is the response I get:
root@mythtv:~# rmmod serial ;setserial /dev/ttyS2 irq 10 port 0xd000 uart 16550;modprobe serial;
ERROR: Module serial does not exist in /proc/modules
FATAL: Module serial not found.

I am using the 686 modules. Is that the problem?