After almost 2 years, I get to go on a long vacation. I have been using this time for so many things, from personal work I have ignored for quite some time to some experiments I have always wanted to do...
One of the things I always wanted to do was to get mythTV running on my pc at home. Having lost touch with active programming ever since ISB, this will hopefully help satisfy the urges of the engineer sleeping.
I have been running dualboot, XP and Ubuntu, Fiesty Fawn at home for quite some time now, preferring Ubuntu mostly because it boots up faster than XP and Firefox comes up much quicker than IE, saving me a lot of the little time I used to get outside work. Even though I have read good reviews of mythbuntu 7.10 on Gutsy Gibbon, I wanted to give compiling and installing mythTV myself first and go to the easier install of 7.10 only if I fail.
The first thing I had to do was to upgrade RAM and get a TV tuner card. While 256 MB should be good enough, I just thought I will upgrade anyway, given I may have to recompile the kernel and also wanted to keep listening to music and browse while I work at home. I have a P4 2.8G system, HP, bought almost 3 years ago. Surprisingly, its seems more than sufficient for most software I need even now, especially with the RAM upgrade to 1.2GB. I got 1GB DDR SDRAM for 2K.
Then possibly the most critical decision, the TV tuner card. I either needed to get a well known card that works well with mythTV and linux or take a risk with a cheaper card. Given that its very tough to get Hauppauge cards anywhere in India (unless you fork out 3K for the card or 10K for a MS MCE upgrade kit), I could pick between Pinnacle PCTV (2.2K) or Intex (only 850 Rs). Pinnacle and Intex are based on the Philips SAA713x chipset. Since the SAA was supported in linux, I got the intex model.
Possibly thats where I have made a mistake. The SAA7134 driver explicitly lists the Pinnacle model in the supported cards list in its driver source. But intex is nowhere to be seen. A little googling threw up one useful link: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_saa7134. This one listed the card and tuner numbers for Intex.
I am now trying various options for the card and tuner numbers to see if any of those will work for my card. Also modifying the driver since I did come close with some of the combinations. I will receive a Gutsy CD in 3-4 days and I am going keep trying until then. If I dont get this to work by then, I would have to fork out the 2.2K for the Pinnacle card and see if mythbuntu 7.10 will fix it for me. Given I want to do so much more with mythTV, especially figuring out xmlTV for the many channels, I hope I get over this step soon.
