Here is what I had to do to get a very basic computer with a Hauppauge PVR-350 to work, including TV out. I realize that all these issues have been discussed in many placeson the net, but I couldn't find a place that brought them all together.

My setup is an AMD Athlon 850, Asus A7v-133 motherboard, Voodoo 3, and enet card. The resulting system is 95-98% idle when recording and watching recorded TV!

Note to the maintainers/developers: KnoppMyth is great. Thank you! I suggest making the comment changes I noted in the XF86config-4 file. I suspect the remaining changes are for the Myth folks.

Step by step instructions to install and get tv-out to work:

1. Sign up for MythTV listing service (e.g., [url]labs.zap2it.com[/url]) This makes installing knoppmyth easier. See http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-9.html for help on this, and also when running mythtv-setup. Deselect the channels you don't plan to view.

2. Install knoppmyth 4.5
Note that the timezone in the install screen is lost, you'll have to enter it again after the reboot.

During mythtv-setup:
General:
Set IP (optional)
Capture Cards:
Select new, choose "MPEG 2 encoder ... PVR-350"
Video Sources:
Select new, pick any name (I used "cable"), then enter your listing service user name and password, and select "Retrieve Linups".
Input Connections:
Go to TV tuner, and enter the video source (e.g., "cable").

Channel Editor can be skipped for now. If you're like me, you'll have to change the "frequency ID" for most of the low numbered channels to get the right labels and programming info since my cable subscriber renumbers many of them.

After retrieving your program guide info, the myth screen will come up. At this time a "Watch tv" on my machine yielded only video noise.

Replace /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv with the following. Note that the "tuner type" is normally 2. Apparently (some?) newer PVR-350 cards require the type to be 39. Some postings say you can use 44, but I couldn't get that to work. So far, I can only see channels 3 through 61. My understanding is that if you could see the TV display in the previous step, you'll want to use "type=2" below.



Reboot (there's probably a way to do this without rebooting, but...)
When prompted, enter the root password, choose "no" for all "reset" questions, and then just exit mythtv-setup without changing anything.

You should now be able to see and hear live TV on your monitor.

If you have trouble getting tv-out to work, here are some helpful resources:

http://www.byopvr.com/Sections+index-req-viewarticle-artid-6-page-2.html
http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2003-November/019431.html
http://www.poptix.net/ivtv/Jul-2003/msg00366.html

copy the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.pvr350-tvout.sample to XF86Config-4.
Here are the changes I had to make to it.



You'll need to make similar changes.

Then exit the Fvwm (left click on the background). When X restarts, you should get the Myth window on your TV and be able to view TV, but it will be *very slow*.

Go to "utilities setup"/setup/tv settings/playback, and navigate to the screen with "Use the PVR-350's TV out/MPGEG decoder", and select it. At this point, watching TV yields a black screen, but with sound.

Exit myth. Then do the following:



See the Feb 20 message from Wlemmers in http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=697 for more info.

Restart myth (I rebooted). You should now see TV, with sound (I use the PVR's sound output to my stereo).

Thanks so much for that sucess story. It got me up and running very quickly on V4.5 , PVR 350 and an AMD setup. (Not sure what chipset, not nforce though).

Now all I have to do is get ndiswrapper working and learn how to do wireless networking in debian. I got on Fedora, so I think I can probably do it here.

MIKE

excellent guide. i didn't see you mention how to find out the busid for the pvr-350 tho. the command is "lspci" for anyone else.

Excellent Post!!!!!
Having a step by step all in one place was a great idea and it installed with no problems.

My question is, would these directions work on a board with an nVidia chip, but not loading the Xmv driver, since you would be using the 350 for input and output? I wanted to buy a new board and like to buy the Chaintech, but want to make sure I could at least get it working with the current directions.
Thanks

Had to work w/ fb0 instead of fb1. I was confused for a bit about whether I should still be removing fb1 or not (relative or absolute instruction). Anyway, adjusting either one wasn't working for me. It turned out that fb0 was the correct one to be removing (it was a relative instruction), but I also had to link fb0current to fb0 to make it work. At least, that's what appeared to make it work.
thx for the great post.

Jeremy

Sorry for the long delay in following up. Been doing more research...

Re: flak; the lspci is actually described in the X86Config file. I should have made it clear that you still have to review the file.

Re tvmyth; I dunno.. I don't think any of the issues I was seeing were specific to the motherboard, although I have had occaisional lockups, but they have been very sporadic, and less frequent as time goes by. Go figure.

Re jenos: Yup, I should have made that clear, the /dev/fbN in question is the same as the X86 config file.

I also had to make a couple of other minor config changes to get the display right. You probably want to check out the PVR 350 howto in the knopp myth wiki http://knoppmythwiki.homelinux.org/index.php?page=HauppaugeThreeFiftyInstallation

If I was more sure of my data, I'd incorporate it into the howto.

And, although not specific to a PVR350, in order to use "http://mythtv/" in your browser (i.e., mythweb) to display the list of recordings you must do:

Ref http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=14239#14239

I still haven't figured out how to use mythweb so that a remote processor can view recordings.

Everything happens as described until I reboot my computer after the



The computer stops at "Initializing Random Number Generator.... DONE".

I feel I'm close. I've tried different things but still got the same result. I'm thinking maybe I'm putting in a wrong value in the XF86Config-4 file. I changed fb1 to fb0 because cat /proc/fb outputs "0 ivtv15 ...". I changed the BUSID to 0:0x0a:0 (also tried 01:0x0a:0) because lspci outputs "01:0a.0".

Help anybody?

Thanks