I have been a tivo user for a fair while now and was looking for more functionality then the tivo so built myself a knoppmyth box. I have a setup using a AMD XP 2800 512 m ram 400 gig hdds fx5200 video card mce remote and a pvr-500mce tuner card, honestly this card is the biggest piece of crap i have ever bought. Days of googleing seems to find the same issues accross the net as im experiencing.

My question is what is a good card to buy, i would prefer digital with encoders on board, but basically i want a good card not something that goes blurry, out of focus. Or a card that requires me to reboot the pc daily. Im not a windows user for that exact reason.

Knoppmyth works fine with my 8 year old bt848 card, i was assuming that technology got better with age and that newer cards would actually perform well, wow wasnt i wrong.

Anyone have a good combination that works well with little or no maintenance.

hey, I've finally got my box runnning and it's on a slower system than yours and my pvr-500 works great, my box has been up for 20+ days now with no reboots or down time.

I'm not sure what your exact problem is with your PVR card or what you don't like is it just quality?... since I've got analog cable and a cheap video card outputting TV on a composite plug, I can't complain... quality is a little worst than when the cable is directly connected to the tv tuner. But for the added functionality of MythTV it's been worth the investment. I'm wondering if your video out on your video card might be the problem? you might need to reconfigure X to fit your TV screen or monitor.

If you're looking for an HD solution, pcHDTV makes good HDTV cards, that work well and are easy to setup in linux.

Anyhow hope this helps some,

- M -

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- Tam -

basically its a quality issue, if i work the box hard for a period of over 2 mins it sends the card out of focus, everything you record or playback is blurry(recording in this mde makes the videos blurry on playback even after a reboot). I have also the issue of machine not recording once this isue occurs. The output video as in menus is clear as is dvds etc. Iv tested the machine with a bt848 card and it doesnt replicate this at all. I have to halt the machine and then turn it back on to fix it, a cold boot wont fix it.

I would try a different version of ivtv/firmware, I hear the 500's can be finiky about both.

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

Xsecrets

im on the newset version of the firmware will see if i can source and older version

Newest is not necessarily the best here. See this page: http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Firmware_versions

well if it helps any I'm using 0.3.7d ivtv drivers for my PVR-500MCE I have read about some success with good video quality using the 0.3.8 drivers as well.

Tho I have noticed that the video chops every now and again. I'm working on fixing that but the recordings and live TV is pretty good using those ones. I tried with the 0.3.9 drivers and they didn't work at all.

Cheers,

- Andrew -

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- Tam -

well finally after around 30 days my mythbox died with a corrupted database, im knd of glad now i can toss this gawd aweful card in the bin. i have 2 mythtv boxes one with the pvr-500 and another with 2 dvico dvb-t plus cards. the dvb card just works i dont see front end crashs lockups, i did upgrade the firmware on the pvr-500 and fixed the focus issue.

hey if you're just tossing it away, I think I could find a slot for it.

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

Xsecrets

Heh That's no good, tho I could definetly find a slot for that if you're getting rid of it

Anyhow, maybe you should try R26, it's got some nice functionality added

Cheers,

- T -

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- Tam -