I was planning to add another single-tuner card to sit next to my PVR-250 when I saw the 500MCE on newegg. From the forum and mailing list it looks like the 500MCE is essentially plug-and-play with recent versions of MythTV (I'm running the latest svn).

What I'm hoping is that I can plug it in, set it up, and then have my same PVR-250 gray remote control all 3 tuners. Will it work like that or will I need more equipment to control the 500 tuners?

Also, my kernel version is 2.6.15-chw-2. Do I need to upgrade it as well? Some of the threads credit 2.6.18 with fixing the 500 while others credit newer versions of MythTV.

Your remote controls MythTV, which in turn controls the tuners. Your PVR-250 remote should continue to work just as it has in the past, you will simply have more tuners for MythTV to use.

That's what I suspected, but I couldn't find a definitive answer. Mmmmm, three tuners...maybe a new HD too...yep I think it's time to go back to newegg. Of course, now that my wife heard the latest Zap2It news she said she might want me to wait. I'd better hurry up and hit 'buy.'

Plugging in the card should just work. You only need one remote since it controls the software (by acting like a keyboard) and the software controls the cards. Of course the fine print goes something like this:

- Some PVR-500 cards have the Samsung tuners on them which didn't work well with older versions of the IVTV drivers.

- You don't state which version of KM you're running. Details like this matter. Given the older kernel I'd guess it's not recent. Upgrading to R5F1 is recommended.

- When you reboot after installing the card it should kick you back into mythtv-setup to configure it. You need to get this right. Setting up both the capture card definition and the input connections for both new tuners. Remember that the PVR-500 is treated as 2 cards.

- The slot that you insert the card in matters, as a result you may discover that the new one is detected before the old one. I recommend rebooting and checking before you close the box back up.

See the R5F1 hints and the BlackScreenWatchingTV troubleshooting page for more.

It's been so long I don't remember the KM version, to be honest. I stopped upgrading KM versions a while back and have been updating the Myth software via SVN; I'm currently using last night's build. I've occasionally considered starting from scratch with R5F1 to clean up things SVN doesn't upgrade like the kernel and all the other hacks I've committed against my box while trying to fix problems I didn't fully understand

"Fixing" things without understanding them reminds me of my old landlord "the home UN-handyman" and his crimes against plumbing. You're probably overdue for an upgrade.

You know how it is: like many others this is a hobby for me, and I generally leave it alone for long periods of time until it manages to make my wife miss one of her shows. Then I jump back on the boards to see how to get myself out of the mess, generally making more changes than were really required to fix the problem, but at such a pace that I never remember everything I did. Then it's back to reality until the next emergency brings me here again. In between there's a lot of other stuff forcing its way into my brain that makes it hard to keep a constant level of MythTV proficiency.

That's why I'll probably archive the /myth partition while it's still small (re-filling from the loss a few weeks back) and reformat the whole drive. Before I do that I'm going to run an apt-get upgrade just to see how bad I can mess everything up