First let me say...WOW. I like what I see...except for the TV of course. The cable PVR is going back if I can make this work!

Setup:
Dell P3 1.0Ghz, 256MB RAM and PVR-250

Problem:
I have set it up 3 times now and can't seem to get the tuning correct. I have wave broadband cable in Silverdale, WA. I have tried us-cable-hrc and us-cable for tuning settings and neither seem to work. Should I be trying something else? The cable works fine with a regular TV. With mythTV I see a fuzzy/snowy B&W picture. I noted when setting things up and scanning for channels it seems to skip some that it should get. Cahnnels 5 and 6 don't work with either setting so I'm not sure what I am doing wrong...cable is screwed in, tried different settings, tried re-installing, ????

I'm at a loss...suggestions are very welcome.

Scanning is bad if you're using zap2it. It'll roach your program guide. You'll need to straighten that out and get a fresh DL of your lineup and program guide from zap2it before addressing the finetuning. On that count, the us-cable-irc frequency set may also be worth trying. See this wiki page and run through the checklist, don't miss the links to various other pages, especially the PictureQuality page.
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... WatchingTV
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... lityIssues

Thanks for the links tjc.

One quick question before I begin. What is the best way to run myth-setup after installation.

My issue is this. Once I quit the myth frontend, I use a shell and run myth-setup. When I do this, it complains that the backend is still runnning and that changing things may not work. I'm not sure how to quit the backend.

Once I am done with myth-setup, how would I go about re-starting the backend AND the front end. The only way I figured out to re-start the front end was to exit out of X11 and let it login again.

A tip for everyone, read thoroughly. The links to answers were right on the link I was given.


GettingBackIntoMytTVsetup explains it well.

GettingBackIntoMytTVsetup explains it well again. Alt 3 to restart the backend and Alt M to start myth.

Sorry for the ignorant questions. Hopefully the answers will help someone else.

OK, I have gone through the setup again with all of the us-cable and us-cable-xxx standards and nothing seems to work. I get a snowy picture of a channel (7 or 13 - I'm not sure which one) that does not change even when changing channels. It doesn't matter which channel I set it to, it stays on the one channel which is hardly visible.

I can hook the same cable up to a TV and cable TV displays.




Woud the last couple of lines saying "tuner type not set" be a problem?



From the log files, it seems that things shoudl be working just fine. I tried a different cable just to make sure and that had no effect. I called the cable CO and they said that it shoudl be set to "sdandard cable" which I'd assume is us-cable.

Capture card setup
Card Type: MPEG-2 encoder card
Video Device: /dev/video0
Default input: Tuner1

Video Source
Name: CableTV
Channel Frequency Table: us-cable

Input Connections
[MPEG: /dev/video0] (Tuner 1) -> CableTV
All the rest are set to: (None)

The guide info is all there. When doing a scan, it seems to skip a few channels in the list here and there. I'm not sure if this would matter either way.

I'm trying to use another input source from the VCR.

It works! I can use the svideo input just fine. It will tune the VCR output, however I only have the 1 output...wow, it's really delayed too. It must be the live buffer.

Anyway, I deleted all channels, re-setup the tuner as the input source, manually added channel 3 and 4, reconnected the cable to the pvr-250 and I still only tune channel 7 and just barely. My Cable Co. is a smaller company (wave broadband in Port Orchard, WA).

It seems to be a tuning issue. I just don't know how to fix it since I've tried us-cable, us-broadcast, us-cable-hrc, us-cable-irc. Should I trying somethign else? Anyone know of a couple of frequencies that I could set directly to test?

Would not running mythfilldatabase cause tuning issues? If changing from one frequency table to another?

Yes.


Wrong, but you're _so_ close. I'm tempted not to tell you, so you get the satisfaction of figuring it out for yourself.

I'll give you a clue, go back and look at the first diagnostic on the CheckingLogFiles page or the 4th top level item on the BlackScreenWatchingTV page. As you already noted above, you need to read these things closely. Also, don't forget to scroll down when you looking at the wiki pages, or you might miss the important parts.

Ok. Since it reports that I have the TCL M2523_5N_E I need to add:
options ivtv tuner=50

to /etc/modprobe.conf

nano /etc/modprobe.conf

add the line. Hit <ctrl> x to save and exit, and then reboot by typing reboot at the command line.

It makes sense when looking at it now. When doing this for the first time, it can be overwhelming with all of the little details and as you noticed, don't read quite closely enough. When it mentions the card being set to type 4, I wasn't exactly sure what thay meant. Perhaps a sample piece of the output showing where one should see type 4 would be helpful for others out there like me. Catching that would have given me something to latch onto and read more in-depth.


For example, a line (or even a wiki link whenever type 4 is written) like this could be added when mentioning type 4

When looking for type 4 if you see a line similar to:
tveeprom 1-0050: tuner model is TCL M2523_5N_E (idx 112, type 4)

Your tuner is not being recognized and you neeed to read TVCaptureCards to correct this problem.

The beautiful thing about wikis is...

It's already there in multiple places.

From: http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=TVCaptureCards


From: http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=CheckingLogFiles


The problem tuner models are also mentioned here, which is intended as sort of an index page:
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=BlackScreenWatchingTV