Well, ever since my last post I’ve been wondering what I could do to get my BP6 MythTV up and running. I’ve been somewhat stumped, but decided to at least follow up on the previous ideas.

I talked to my dad and he was vaguely familiar with the problem. The main difference between PCI2.1 and PCI2.2 is the difference between 5V power and 3.3V power. PCI2.1 has leads for 3.3V input but they aren’t required, therefore on older hardware (before 2.2) they aren’t connected. He said he could get a 3.3V Regulator and together we could install it in the system and probably get the card working. That still wouldn’t solve my problem of getting 2 tuners, but I figured that if it got the PVR-150 to work then I could probably duplicate the work to get a PVR-500 working. Still, it seemed risky and cumbersome.

So I shot an email off to Hauppauge‘s Sales Team asking if they sold any PCI2.1 complaint cards. They forwarded it to the Technical Support team and I’ve been talking to Mr. Henriquez about it for a few days now. Apparently, the PVR-150 is the only PCI2.2 card they have, everything else is PCI2.1. Even more interesting, only the most recent hardware revision is 2.2, all the previous ones were 2.1. He kindly offered to switch out my PVR-150 for an older hardware revision, free of charge, even though I bought it through a reseller (NewEgg). I was impressed, and asked about the PVR-500. Right now I’m negotiating to trade in my PVR-150 for credit towards a PVR-500.

Also, just so you don’t think I’m forgetting something, a coworker of mine let me borrow his PVR-250 (He’s recently switched his house over to a Slingbox system, and loving it). I popped it into the system and immediately things were different. The BIOS detected a new “Multimedia Device” on the PCI bus, and Linux printed out that it found a Multimedia Device as well. MythTV loaded it up with no troubles and was able to perform a complete channel scan, and then download the initial channel data from Zap2It. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as I got. It seems it’s getting confused between the BTTV and IVTV drivers, and no matter what I do it keeps loading the BTTV drivers instead. I think I need to just dig deeper into the autodetection stuff because it seems to be overridding me at ever turn.

So, it looks like there’s hope yet. I’m going to be out of town next week attending the HPCMP User’s Group Conference in Denver, Colorado. Hopefully while I’m there, with my swank new M1710, I can continue to talk to the folks at Hauppauge and be ready to trade in my card when I get back. I might get this working yet.

Update 6/27/06
I just got another email from Hauppauge about this.  Evidently I have a “MCE” or “Media Center Edition” card, specifically designed for use in Windows Media Center computers.  What makes an MCE different from a retail?  Evidently, all the MCE stuff is certified by Microsoft, and one of the certification criteria is that the card works on the PCI2.2 3.3V power.  I’m not entirely sure why they are so picky about that, but evidently Microsoft thinks it’s important.

[tag:mythtv][tag:dvr][tag:pvr][tag:hauppauge]

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