I originally had my system working with an old tuner card so I recently decided to upgrade to a PVR500. I installed the card in a different slot and removed the old one. I setup the card in the capture cards section and then went to assign a video source to it, but I get nothing when I scan for channels. I got the impression from the Wiki that this card worked out of the box in the newest version of knoppmyth. Also everytime I reboot I get prompted to the the root password and it starts up into myth setup so I am assuming it keeps trying to setup the cards. Any suggestions on have to get this going?

It does. Did you drop all your old card definitions first? Did you look at the logfiles to make sure the tuner chip was getting recognized?

For more things to look at, see the troubleshooting pages on the wiki - http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=TroubleShooting

how do I drop the old card definition (I didn't see reference to this in the wiki)? Is this just removing it through the knoppmyth GUI? I did do that.

In mythtv-setup under Capture Cards there's a menu item to celete all of your cards.

Have you looked at the other issues on the wiki page you were directed to like tuner chip type?

Well I opted to start fresh with the latest version of knoppmyth. I do have a signal now, but the picture quality is horrible. Much worse than my old tuner that had no on board encoding.

Just thought I'd throw my 2-cents in.
I have 2 PVR-500 cards with the Samsung tuners in 2 different systems. One system already had a PVR-350 and was working great, the other is a new build. Both are running R5D1 and hooked up to NTSC basic cable. I purchased the PVR-500's about a week ago and when I installed them they were useless. Both cards would not display any useable video on any channel. I searched and tried a lot of different suggestions. It was when I found this... http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ght=pvr500 that that I was able to get the cards in both systems working.

All I did was...

Make sure the tuners are idle and will be for awhile (the idle time needed depends on the speed of your system. My P4 3.2Ghz took over 30 minutes).

SSH or Ctl-Alt-F1 and login as root.
Issue the following commands:

cd ~
wget http://www.madslab.com/pvr500_samsung_patch_2.6.17.diff
cd /usr/src/linux/drivers/media/video/
patch -p0 < /root/pvr500_samsung_patch_2.6.17.diff
cd /usr/src/linux
make ; make modules_install
rmmod ivtv ; rmmod tuner
modprobe tuner ; modprobe ivtv

(The command "make ; make modules_install" will take the longest).

As I mentioned, this has fixed both of my PVR-500 systems. One has been in use with a PVR-350 for some time and has had a lot of "tweaks" done to it, the other was a clean install.
I'm not very impressed with the 500 vs the 350, the 500 seems to have weaker tuners and because I live in a area that was hit by hurricane Rita last year, my cable company is still having week signal problems from time to time and both tuners of the 500 on both systems will have snow or other distortions that the 350 hardly ever has.
I've tried the suggestion of putting a RF amp inline with the 500. Strangly it makes things worse. While on another system (ATI All in Wonder based) with it (the same RF amp) never has a problem.

Ok, so 2-cents turned into a buck-50. But I hope this helps!

Thanks for the info and the steps. I will try this in the morning and see how things turn out. Once again thanks for posting the exact steps as you did as this will make things a alot easier for me to get things taken care of.

This seemed to work out very well. I'm still not 100% impressed with the picture quality, but it is much better than before. Is there anything special I need to set for the PVR500 to get the sound working? My old tuner card had a cable I had to connect to the motherboard, but the PVR500 does not, that I can see atleast. Thanks for the help.

I don't remember doing anything to get sound. I have not plugged anything into the card other than the coax. But as I'm typing this I do remember having problems getting sound out of the on-board card. I've since installed a Sound Blaster Live card.
Not all cards are Linux compatable. My system boots to fast for me to see the screens for errors durring boot and viewing logs can be fun as well. But the rull of thumb I found is: if you are watching TV and hit "F9" or "|" and it displays "Mute On" or "Mute Off", then your sound card is working with Linux and the problem is elsewhere (Mixer settings etc...), if nothing is displayed then your sound card is not Linux compatable and you will need to find one that is.

Is there a way to un-do the above patch? I'm hesitant to try it, in case it makes things worse.

Thanks.
Zig

Not by following the instuctions above. They are patching a file without making a backup. This will make the backup...

Make sure the tuners are idle and will be for awhile (the idle time needed depends on the speed of your system. My P4 3.2Ghz took over 30 minutes).

SSH or Ctl-Alt-F1 and login as root.
Issue the following commands:

cd ~
wget http://www.madslab.com/pvr500_samsung_patch_2.6.17.diff
cd /usr/src/linux/drivers/media/video/
cp tuner-types.c /root
patch -p0 < /root/pvr500_samsung_patch_2.6.17.diff
cd /usr/src/linux
make ; make modules_install
rmmod ivtv ; rmmod tuner
modprobe tuner ; modprobe ivtv

And if you need to put things back...

As before, make sure the tuners are idle, etc...

SSH or Ctl-Alt-F1 and login as root.
Issue the following commands:

cd /usr/src/linux/drivers/media/video/
cp /root/tuner-types.c tuner-types.c #(Answer y to overwrite existing file)
cd /usr/src/linux
make ; make modules_install
rmmod ivtv ; rmmod tuner
modprobe tuner ; modprobe ivtv

This sound card worked with the original installation I had, so I am guess it is a setting in alsamixer that I need to change. How do you get back to the GUI screen after doing the CTRL-ALT-F1?

ctrl-alt-f7 should get you back

It's taken awhile but I'm learning, ctrl-alt-f1-6 are all aternate consoles, ctrl-alt-f7 takes you back to the GUI, (also called x, or gnome I think)

_________________
R5D1 MythTV 0.20
AMD Sempron 64 2600+
Biostar K8NHA mobo w/nForce3
Chaintech SH5200 vcard w/128 MB
Hauppauge PVR500 MCE
1 GB DDR 400
300 GB IDE Seagate HD
NEC 3550A DL DVD burner
BTC 9019URF wireless keyboard
WMP54G Linksys Wireless NIC

I think it's actually just Alt+F7.

_________________
KM R5E50; K8NGM2; A64-3800+; 1024MB PC3200; LG DVD-RW; Seagate 750GB; 6600 PCI-E; Onboard sound; Hauppauge PVR-150

I had a snowy channel 3 on tuner 2 of the pvr500. All other channels were fine. Adding 2 amps in series pretty much fixed channel 3. I thought I'd try the patch on r5d1 to see if that would help.

The patch made it worse on some upper UHF channels (27 in particular) and channel 3 was still no better.

When I went to reversed the patch, I got a whole bunch of warnings during and it only took 5 minutes where as it took 45 minutes when applying the patch!

after doing the box hung hard. I couldn't even ssh in. My heart sunk, I thought I hosed it.

After pressing reset and rebooting everything seems back to pre patch normal. My question is would it be typical that would take 45 minutes the first time and only 5 minutes the second time, or is something definitely screwy here?