I spent some time last night working on my MythTV. I hit newegg and bought a Hauppauge PVR-150, a Pioneer DVD RW, and a Sabrent SBT-SP6C Sound Card. I dropped em all in my machine without any trouble, and was finally able to Install KnoppMyth. After five hours of fighting with it, I’ve just about given up.

KnoppMyth installed just fine. I first used R5B7, but upgraded to R5C7 later in the process. It’s a beautiful and simple install, walking you through every step and autodetecting 90% of the system. I easily setup a Zap2It account with the TV listings for my area, and configured MythTV to use it. The only problem was that no matter what I tried, the PVR-150 remained “invisible”. Linux didn’t detect it, the ivtv drivers didn’t detect it, and an lspci didn’t even show it installed. I was baffled.

I spent the entire night rearranging the cards in the slots, because the BP6 has some interesting IRQ-sharing rules (Didn’t find that out until I put my PVR-150 and the NIC on PCI4 & 5 and lost my network access). Finally, after alot of research and experimentation, it seems I’m suffering from a PCI Incompatibility. The BP6 is PCI2.1 compliant, while the PVR-150 wants a PCI2.2 compliant port (for voltage), so it’s essentially undervolted in my system. Basically, the card is “off” and I lack the power to turn it on. At this point, I’m somewhat befuddled as to what to do next.

  1. There are a few obscure references to hard-wiring a 3.3V line to the port to activate cards in similar situations, but this is dangerous. I could blow out the card, or the motherboard (not that either would be a horrible loss). Even if this worked, it won’t solve #2.
  2. I really wanted to put 2 of these in the system for watch-one-while-recording-another functionality, but it seems I won’t have enough PCI slots. PCI1 is obscured by the Video Card, and my other PCI slots are occupied with a soundcard, NIC, and a PVR-150.
  3. There are rumors that the PVR-350 works in this motherboard. This could be my solution, as I believe it internally contains 2 MPEG encoders. This single card would effectively replace 2 PVR-150′s (or a PVR-250 and a 150, to be more exact). If this is true, and it works in this motherboard, then I might have hope. I’m going to have to do alot more research first.

So, for now I’m stumped. NewEgg doesn’t even seem to carry the PVR-350, so I’ve got to find someplace that does (and that accepts PayPal preferably). I’ll keep you updated.
[tag:mythtv][tag:bp6][tag:hauppauge][tag:pvr][tag:dvr]

Update:
Doh.. looks like I was mistaken, it’s the PVR-500 that has 2 builtin tuners.  I doubt that it will work with the BP6 :-(

Be Sociable, Share!