baishen78,
did the steps suggested by tjc solve your problem?

Reason I ask is that I had the same problem as you with the channel icons missing and the channel names shown as "Adding Channel ## .."

So, before stumbling across this thread I decided to delete my capture cards in mythtv-setup and add them back in, now I don't get anything, I just get the black screen when I watch tv.

I read up on that Wiki page which tjc pointed you to and are convinced everything is ok. I have been using my Airstar HD capture card for weeks without a problem, things only started to go pear shaped when I added my Hauppauge PVR-500. tjc helped me to get my pvr-500 recognized by pointing me to update the v4l driver.

After reading this thread and the others pointed to by tjc I tried running the 'mysql -u-root ....' step to see if the cards were detected ok. They seemed to be and the three tuners were listed correctly as 1,2 and 3.

Anyway, since mysql didn't show and problem I decided to try the following steps based on what slowtolearn and Gnarl suggested in the post titled 'Change Tuner number' ..

1. Stop mythbackend
2. drop all card in mythtv-setup
3. mysql mythconverg
truncate capturecard;
quit
4. mysql -u root mythconverg -e "select * from capturecard" (to check DB is clean)
5. start mythbackend
6. stop mythbackend
7. setup cards again in mythtv-setup
8. start backend
9. mythfilldatabase
10. watch tv?

.. problem is that I still see a black screen when I watch TV

At this point I am totally stumped. Prior to this I have been able to watch TV on my PVR-500 but just had the problem with the corrupted channel names, now my system seems to be screwed.

Anyone got any ideas how I can recover from this situation?

Oh, I am using R5E50, which I installed using autoinstall. It is a combined frontend-backend.

<edit> went into setup and deleted all capture cards and shut down. Then removed my Airstar card and repeated the steps above. The fault persists, i.e. black screen while watching TV. Therefore I can rule out problems with the PVR-500 and the Airstar being in the same system.

thanks,

Kevin

Did you set the card type for the PVR-500 as "MPEG-2 encoder card (PVR-x50, PVR-500)"? If set to "Analog V4L capture card" you would experience the black screen when trying to watch TV.

Someone else was having the "Adding Channel ## .." problem recently and it turned out that they were scanning for analog channels which is a no-no. You may need to drop all your video sources and recreate them to clear this.

BTW - if you're scanning for HDTV channels it's best to do this after you set up you SDTV channels using the grabber.

From what I can remember, from when I first installed the PVR-500 I did do a scan for the analogue channels, but I assumed that that there wasn't any problem because I could watch each channel ok on my TV, it was *just* the channel names and the missing icons that were wrong. I suppose I just went in and did what I have always done for my AirStar without thinking about it.

To be honest, I have always been a little confused by the Wiki when it says ..

"Under "5. Channel Editor",if you have a downloadable channel lineup and program guiide like zap2it, DO NOT scan for SDTV channels ...."

I have not been scanning for SDTV channels in '5. Channel editor', however I have been scanning for SDTV channels in '4. Input sources'. Does this equate to the same thing, is this still a big no-no?

What is the correct way to install my PVR-500, should I just set the video source as zap2it and then do the 'get listings from source' option, followed by a mythfilldatabase when I exit setup?



Thanks for the tip, actually I have been doing it the other way, i.e. setting up my Airstar card first.



Yes, I have been selecting the MPEG-2 encoder card option, but I will be sure to check this when I do my next dump of the cards and reinstall.

<edit> One thing I forgot to ask ..
The Wiki says (Under "4. Input Connections") "DO NOT associate everything with the same "Video Source" or the software will not know which input to choose for the given channel". But earlier in that section it says "it is OK to associate inputs from multiple different cards (the PVR-500 is treated as two cards) with the same video source", so from this I assume that it is ok to set my video source as 'zap2it' for all three tuners? ..

PVR-500 Tuner1
PVR-500 Tuner2 (same card)
AirStar HD card


thanks for your help,

Kevin

Yes and Yes. Do NOT scan for SDTV channels if you are using a listing service such as Zap2It, simply 'get listings from source' and mythfilldatabase will do the rest. You WILL need to scan for channels for your AirStar (as you already know).

This could be due to the above. Reading your previous post I was under the impression that you had cleared that up already, but were having trouble watching live TV. Apologies for any confusion.

Yes, if they all have the same channel lineup. I'm not sure that this would be true for the HD and SD cards...

The section that says:

Is just reiterating what is said in the section above. The intent was to reinforce the point and make sure it wasn't missed. Compare that point with the lead in paragraph (emphasis added):


That wiki page contains a lot of repetion because people weren't reading the whole thing. As a matter of fact I'll probably go and add even more repetion about not scanning for SDTV channels in North America... (BTW - The page now says this in 3 seperate places to avoid confusion.)

slowtolearn & tjc,

My Airstar card is HD only, previously I have set the video source to be zap2it, then performed a QAM-256 channel scan which finds 12 or so HD channels. Then while watching each channel I use the frontend channel editor to enter the channel number (or channel name) which matches the zap2it lineup.

This has more or less worked ok, I have had problems with a few of the HD channels not showing the program guide info. Even though the channel editor successfully filled in the correct channel ID, etc. This was one of the things left on my list to sort out.

BTW I was not criticizing the Wiki page, like many I have read in the process of getting my myth box working, the information is very good and a great help.

Kevin

Ok, so I have now got the two tuners of the PVR-500 working and the program guide is correct, thanks for all your help with this.

So I decided to procede with adding in the Airstar HD card ..

I shut my system down and installed the Airstar card, booted up and went into setup. I added the Airstar and scanned for QAM-256 channels which it found ok (show up as 58#0, 58#1, etc)

I started the backend and ran mythfilldatabase, then ran up MythTV.

Although when I bring up the program guide I can see the Airstar channels listed (58#0, 58#1, etc) when I try to watch them I see a load of fuzz on the screen as if it is not selecting the Airstar but using the PVR-500 input instead. Note that at the moment I don't have a splitter so at this point the cable is only connected to the Airstar, the input to the PVR-500 is floating.

I know the Airstar card is good, I have been using it for months. It appears that although I select to watch the channel identified as 58#0 that it is choosing to use the PVR-500 instead for some reason.

Any ideas what could be wrong?

Should I start another thread for this problem?

<edit>
I found this thread which is somewhat related ..

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... iple+tuner

Except, in my case I don't even seem to be able to switch between the PVR-500 and Airstar by using the program guide, it still appears to be stuck on using the PVR-500 even though I select a channel in the guide which should only available from my Airstar card.

Am I doing somtheing wrong here?

I will keep searching these forums, hopefully someone will have hit this problem before.


thanks,

Kevin

Didn't think you were, I was trying to clarify. The Troubleshooting pages are a work in progress. Whenever I can pin down something in particular that is confusing people I try to fix it.

I tried the following ..

mysql -u root mythconverg -e "select * from capturecard"

And it returned ..

cardid videodevice audiodevice vbidevice cardtype ........
1 /dev/video0 NULL NULL MPEG Tuner 1 NULL mythtv ...
2 /dev/video1 NULL NULL MPEG Tuner 1 NULL mythtv ...
3 0 DVB DVBInput NULL mythtv ...

(lines truncated for clarity)

I noticed that for my Airtstar card it is showing as '0', whereas the two tuners of my PVR-500 show up as /dev/video0 and /dev/video1, could this be related to my problem?

I think DVB does things differently. Also see this thread where the bogus definitions ended up in the cardinput table. http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14597

thanks tjc, I will read up on that post.

BTW I just read about the hotkey for switching tuners, by default it is 'y'.

I just tried this and it does switch between my three tuners. I can switch it to my HD tuner (Airstar) and I can watch HD channels ok.

So my Airstar card does seem to be set up ok, now I *just* need to figure out how to get MythTV to automatically switch between SD tuners (PVR-500) and HD tuner (Airstar) when I moved between channnels in the program guide or use the channel up/down buttons on my streamzap remote.

From that post I referred to earlier I wonder if MythTV can acually do this?

I do hope that it can as having to manually tell MythTV to use a different tuner is going to be a real pain.

Perhaps there is some trick using the channel editor where you can force it to use only certain tuners for specific channels.

Maybe someone who has a multiple tuner, mixed SD/HD system has experience of this,

Kevin

On my R5D1 + .20 system I punch in a channel number that I can only get on SDTV and Myth changes to the first appropriate tuner. Channel up/down I believe only works on the current tuner, don't know about the program guide.

EDIT: Just checked, and it will switch tuners from within the Program Guide while watching TV.

slowtolearn,
Are your SD and HD tuners on physically separate cards or on the same (such as pchdtv cards)?

If they are on separate cards then I ought to be able to get my system to work the same. Which tuner cards are you using? Can you describe the steps you did to install your cards? Did you do anything sneaky in the channel editor to help it know when it has to change tuner?

tjc said to install the SDTV tuners first, followed by the HD one, this is what I did.

Interesting that you have an R5D1 + .20 system, not that I have any evidence that my tuner problems are due specifically to R5E50 but I know that whitepines ended up sticking with R5D1 + .20 because he found that combination much more stable. I would try that combination but I fear that the install process is not going to be that straightforward for me. Already I have to go through the pain of installing the latest nvidia driver, the ivtv driver update for my PVR-500 and install the driver for my Dlink wireless usb, if the process for R5D1 requires anything different it could really set me back.

thanks,

Kevin

Make sure you've got seperate video sources defined for the SD and HD tuners. This is part of how the software knows which card to use for a given channel. Given more than one cards/inputs associated with the same "Video Source" by an "Input Connection" entry, when you change channels the software is going to follow the standard card selection rules. If the channel is supposedly available the to the input you're currently using based on the input connection and video source, it'll stick with the current card. After that there are the card priority rules...