I’m a noob to this so everyone bear with me I have an AMD Athlon xp 1900+, 512mb, 180 GB HDD, onboard nivida video & sound blaster card. The box is set up perfectly from what I can tell connection to the internet works great and I get the listing for TV show just fine but when I go to watch live TV the machine restarts and when I try to record live TV all I get is snow.

Can anyone tell me what I’m doing wrong?


p.s. the Hauppauge PVR 500 is connecting to the dish satellite receiver via coaxial cable.

im also using knoppmyth R5D1

Don't know about the restart issue, maybe more hardware details would help there. What motherboard are you using? What is the Northbridge/Southbridge chipset? Could you have the Via DMA problem?

For the "snow" the problem is most likley that the card is failing to tune either due to failed hardware detection or misconfiguration. To troiubleshoot that see this wiki page: http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=BlackScreenWatchingTV Don't forget to follow the links! Especially the one to the CheckingLogFiles page. If you don't understand something don't just skip it, ask about it.

I have an MSI "km2m combo" and yes it is via chip sets; as for the card it works fine I checked it inside my windows xp media center pc and it views and records TV fine so I must have it not configured right.

i finally got it to work but its not all the way there

problem #1: tv can only be viewed on channel 3 or 4 depending on the number the reciver is set at.

problem #2: i dont have control of the channels when i change it, but when i do go to the channels i see the info just no picture. i have to change the channels though the satellite reciver.

problem #3: tv is only seen in black and white w/ sound but alot of static.

question: do i have to change something in the reciver so that i can veiw channels from the pvr or is the a particular reciver that is needed to gain control to see all channels?

I'll never understand why people expect a tuner card to work differently than a TV in this context...

When you use a cable or satellite box like this _IT_ becomes the "effective tuner". If you've got a TV hooked to it VIA co-ax you set the TV to the appropriate "rebroadcast" channel and leave it there. Then you use the remote for the cable box to change the channel on the cable box right?

If you want to have some other device (like a Tivo or a KnoppMyth box) record off of the co-ax output of that cable box, you need to "pretune" them to the appropriate channel, and give them some means of controlling the box.

This can be done with various types of physical connections like serial cable, firewire, ... but the most common method involves something called an IRblaster, which is an output adapter which lets your PVR generate the same InfraRed signals as the cable box remote control does when you press the buttons.

Once you have one of these you need to set up a "external tuning script" which sends the appropriate signals to the cable box.

Searching for the term "irblaster" will find you the needed information on this.