A few months ago I bought a used motherboard with the goal of upgrading my MythTV backend. The upgrade went smoothly from a hardware and operating system point of view but Myth was never the same for some reason. Adding to the confusion was that I could tune and watch channels using the command-line tool mplayer but Myth would never properly scan channels.
After a little tinkering (and Googling) yesterday, I decided to try increasing the scanning timeouts using MythTV-setup. Where the previous 3 second timeout was once adequate, I bumped both the tuning and signal timeouts to 10 seconds. By feeding the channels.conf file I created using atscscan, I avoided having Myth tune through all 83 channels. That mitigated the pain of the longer timeouts. Presto! I successfully added the channels back into Myth.
And boy, do they look good. The previous HDTV signals were good, but they were also spotty. Now that the digital antennas have claimed the top spots on the stations’ transmission towers, the digital signals are coming in rock solid.
Myth should save our sanity a bit at home, as the kids can now watch something other than the DVD shows they’ve seen 1,000 times already!
At our house, we have discovered that our TV has a button labeled ‘O/I’. We think the reception is much better when you put it in ‘O’ mode.
We don’t watch a lot of TV but the only shows we do watch are on PBS.
Bram basically doesn’t watch any TV at all, but the one show he did ask us to record was Junkyard Wars! (Which, sadly, isn’t on broadcast TV.)
Have you tried grabbing channels from Time Warner or are you just fetching OTA? I’m wondering how much of the basic cable package you can get through one of their Firewire tuners. I’ve already determined that most channels are encrypted QAM, minus the local channels, so I’m hoping a firewire tuner will open that up some.
I’m strictly OTA, Magnus. Let me know what you find out, though!
Gotcha. My own MythTV has been down for about a year. Needed the hardware for other things. But there is a good chance I will have several dedicated backend boxes this week, plus I’ve already got one HDHomeRun to throw at this. I will probably allocate the HDHomeRun to OTA capture. Once I have all of that up & running I’ll get a couple of Firewire tuners to try to integrate into the mix.