[CentOS] MythTV on Centos 4

[Scot L. Harris]

On Mon, 2005-09-26 at 19:36, Kirk Bocek wrote:
> Scot L. Harris wrote:
> > I assume you are just connecting the cable straight from the wall to the
> > capture card?  I find this works very well.
> 
> Yes, I'm going to use the analog service from the cable company. We also 
> have a digital box but I hope to get this working well enough to do away 
> with it.
> 

That is all I am using.  I dropped all pay channels a long time ago and
don't really need the digital service.

> Speaking of which, is there any such beast as a *digital* cable tuner card?
> 

Not that I am aware of.  The problem is that different cable companies
use different equipment, no real wide used standard.  The best you are
going to do is to setup mythtv to use an IR blaster to change channels
on the digital cable box.  Have not done that here but understand that
many people have set this up.  Only problem is that you need a cable box
for each capture card you setup for digital cable. 

Actually there is another option to the IR blaster.  I understand that
some cable boxes come with firewire outputs that you can connect to the
system.  In some cases it sounds like this can be used to control
channel changing.  I think this is used primarily for HD recording.  You
would need to check the mailing list for the details.  I don't expect to
get into HDTV anytime soon.

> > 
> > Where it got confusing was getting the capture cards in slave backends
> > working.  
> 
> I believe you were going to share your gotchas in setting up the backend...

The main gotcha I ran into is that during install you end up with
multiple copies of mysql.txt files on the system.  You must make sure
that they all are configure consistently and point to the master backend
system where the actual mysql database lives.  

You run mythtv-setup on the slave backend and configure things but don't
setup channel lists.  That is only done on the master backend system. 
If everything is communicating correctly you will have video listings
available from the master backend.  

Also when you setup the masterbackend make sure to use the actual IP
address or name of the masterbackend instead of using localhost.

And if you do delete capture cards or channel listings you will need to
reconfigure those on the master backend then the slave backend.

If you forget to do that you will loose scheduled recordings since there
won't be any capture cards available.

Also after running mythtv-setup remember to restart mythbackend on the
master and slave.  You can verify things have been setup correctly by
looking at mythweb's status page.  It will list all of the capture cards
available for use.

I also found in Jarod's guide a good trick to fix some ghosting I was
getting on the slave backend.  Not sure why but I had to modify the
dnr_temporal options on the PVR-350 and PVR-250.  Did not have to do
this on the master backend just the capture cards on the slave backend.
For some reason they would default to a value of 8.  Setting them to 0
fixed the ghosting I was seeing.