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

[Preston Hagar]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Peter Hanson <peter.e.hanson at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss



I may have to just breakdown and setup myth.  I've been using Freevo for a
frontend for the one TV the computer is directly connected to, and I like
it better than myth for its simplicity.  I currently have 2 x 2TB drives in
software RAID 1 for storage.  I've been using a script I wrote that uses dd
on the video device to record the live video from the Hauppage 850 tuner I
have.  It works well, but like I said previously, I sometimes get skips and
dropouts.  I might have to look into an HDHomerun.