In the interim, you can try a standard TV antenna. They're non-directional and have no gain, but better than nothing.

-brendan

I'm thinking about stopping at Walmart on the way home from work and picking up one of the "HDTV ready" antennas that are in the $30 range.

So far I can get several channels while scanning for QAM. It's interesting. When I try to tune I get the No PIDS set, please correct your channel setup error. Then I select a known channel to see if it will tune and no luck... hmm... I'm going to keep at it tonight.

Ok, I can watch QAM broadcast but the video is very choppy as is the sound. I'm not exactly sure what's wrong. The PC is plenty fast enough. It even picks up digital channels off of the cable as well. When I tried to enable XvMC there is an error that video cannot be displayed (I searched some and found that it's a common problem).

Next step is to get the hd3000 working with smooth playback.

when you say plenty fast what is that? You know it takes over 3G and a video card that has good xv drivers to playback hdtv.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Well, I installed R5A15.1 and tried to set up this card, but I can't get past step 4 from ceenvee703 earlier post on this thread. I choose the DVB setting, but it doesn't recognize that I have an HD3000. By the way, I tried "modprobe dvb-btxx" that cecil recommended in his announcement, but it errored out on me. I googled a little and found some references to "modprobe dvb-bt8xx", so I tried that, and it loaded some modules, but still nothing on step 4.

Did you first shut down the backend? I believe you have to use (as root) "/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend stop". Then run mythtv-setup. I had problems with mythtv-setup failing to recognize I had a HD3000 that probably would have not occurred had I stopped my backend.

Yeah, I stopped the backend with that command. I tried a couple more times just for good measure .

Did "modprobe dvb-btxx" work for you?

I didn't have the card in the box when I installed R5A15.1. Will that make a difference? I am thinking about rolling back to R5A12, and using the old drivers.

So, before reverting to R5A12, I decided to re-install R5A15.1 with the HD3000 installed.

This got me past step 4 !

I didn't have to modprobe anything thus far. I'll let you know how the rest goes.

I didn't have to modprobe for the HD3000 card; it just worked.

I'm not sure if it matters if the card wasn't in there when you installed. It's certainly easy enough to just do an install now that the card's in there to see if it helps; that would be my solution but that's because it's the easiest (if the most unsubtle).

Oops, just saw you took the unsubtle approach--glad it worked, hopefully the rest will go well.

Thanks for your help with this.

I have another quick question. This time about step 8. (by the way, I set the default tuner to a known good channel, and viola...I see HDTV!) I am in the channel editor. I selected a channel to edit. I see a bunch of settings. There is a channel number at the top, and an XMLTVID at the bottom. Am I supposed to copy the XMLTVID into the "channel number" at the top? I just need a little clarification, because you said to jot the number down (makes me think I am supposed to go to a different settings area).

No; let me try to explain it better.

For each channel, after you scan for channels, you should have two channels in the Channel Editor screen... one that was downloaded from Zap2It, and one that was scanned by the DVB scan. The Zap2It one will have the XMLTVID, the one that was scanned won't. Copy or write down the XMLTVID from the Zap2It channel and enter it into the XMLTVID field for the DVB channel. Once you do this (and restart the backend) the scanned channel will have programs listed in the Program Guide, just like the Zap2It channel (since it now has the same XMLTVID).

Hope that is more clear.

The machine is an AthlonXP 2600+ with 512mb ram and an Nvidia MX440 128mb card (using 7174 drivers). It's right on the edge of what you are suggesting.

On another note I finally got it to tune HD. Again, it bumps and skips a little, but now that I think about what Xsecrets said, it could be that the machine isn't fast enough.

My problem now is that when I reinstalled my PVR-250 that doesn't work now. I'll have to look into that and post in a different thread.

ceenvee703,

I understood that better. Thanks.


Unfortunately, my playback is choppy. I am running on a P4 3.0GHz w/ 1GB RAM and FX5200 hooked up to a monitor.

Yes, as you will see from messages in this very thread, as well as many others elsewhere, getting a system that will play HD back smoothly is the whole trick. I have an AMD 2600+ with nVidia 8X AGP FX5200 and 512MB of RAM, and it doesn't even come close when playing back inside of MythTV. (I was able to get playback from within mplayer when I compiled it myself a few versions back, and can get playback from within xine if I run the transport stream through a Windows utility first and make a .mpg file.)

Here's a thread that discusses a whole bunch of things that affect playback:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/m ... ers/122606

If XvMC wasn't so buggy, it would help tremendously. I was able to play back HD recordings smoothly with the above system under R4V5 and MythTV when I turned XvMC on. The second you try to DO anything with XvMC turned on, though--skip forward/back, pause, change channels--and boom...