[NTLUG:Discuss] Some background on tomorrow's meeting, Saturday 10/19

[Peter Hanson]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 1:09 PM, Preston Hagar <prestonh at gmail.com> wrote:

> If anyone has setup mythTV or some other OTA on Linux, I would be
> interested in your methods.

[snip]

>  I'm currently using a USB Hauppage
> TV tuner, that more or less works, but I had to rig up my own recording
> scripts because I couldn't find any "pre-packaged" ones that work.  I also
> still get frame drop outs even though if I watch the same signal from the
> same antenna directly on the TV, it is clear.  My guess is it has something
> to do with my recording script and possibly either the hard drives aren't
> keeping up with the volume of data, or perhaps the TV tuner card driver is
> buggy.
>
> Anyway, if anyone has a TV tuner card that works well in Linux with the new
> digital TV signals,  I would love a recommendation


I've been relying on MythTV for years. This configuration has evolved over
time. It is more than enough for my needs. Even though broadcast TV is
almost all I watch, I rarely need to record 3 shows at once. This setup can
record 3 HD files at once with no file corruption. The HDhomerun tuner is a
hassle-free appliance. I have no experience with USB tuners.

Location & antenna:
..My house is in zip code 75243 (~30 miles from the broadcast antennas)
..I use a Channelmaster 4228 antenna mounted on my chimney.
..cable run is more than 100ft of RG-6 cable, a 2-way splitter in the
attic, then a 3-way splitter near the tuners.

Tuner 1 & Tuner 2:
..dual-tuner HDHomerun through 100Mb/s Fast Ethernet.

Server (MythTV Backend & Tuner 3):
..processor: AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 (dual core, up to 2.1GHz)
..motherboard: Asus M2A-VM HDMI (AMD 690G Chipset)
....network: Gigabit Ethernet
..distribution: mythbuntu 12.04 w/ MythTV 0.27
..hard drive: 1TB Samsung "green" drive
....file system for recordings: XFS (seemed like a good idea ~2006)
..tuner: PCHDTV-3000 PCI tuner card (kernel module is cx88_dvb)

Playback (mythtv frontend)
..motherboard & processor: Asus AT3IONT-I (Atom 330 & NVidia graphics)
....network: Gigabit Ethernet
..distribution: mythbuntu 12.04 (using proprietary NVidia driver for VDPAU
accelerated playback of Mpeg-2)

Available MythTV features that I do not use:
..Using different antennas / sources for each tuner
..Automated transcoding from native MPeg2 to h.264, etc.
..Serving recordings (native or transcoded) over LAN using DLNA
..Streaming recordings from the server's MythWeb interface

If that didn't answer your question, let me know.
Peter