Well always liking to fiddle with gadgets although quite poor lol, I saved up and bought a new TV card for my MythTV HTPC box.
Researching - ordering
I ordered the card through Digitan, they were the cheapest on StaticIce still the best PC parts price finder I reckon. I payed for the card with some funds I had in PayPal, Digitan accept PayPal payments, so it all worked out great. The service and delivery were unbelievable, I ordered on the tuesday it was here on the wednesday, of course I missed the courier so had to wait till the next day to receive the card.
Initial dramas
I took my old TV card out of the box and replaced it with the Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual tuner, no probs with any part of the installation all went well. I fired up the HTPC and started configuring the MythTV backend, to cut a long story short because It was a bit of an epic lol, I found that while DVB:1 worked and tuned the channels flawlessly, DVB: 0 was not so encouraging in wanting to work with me, I would hate to send something back without fully investigating if it was something I was or was not configuring correctly.
Some Light
Only then did I ring the Australian Distributor New Magic I talked to a guy at New Magic and he said it's possible you have old stock as there was a batch of cards that did exactly what I was describing, he gave me the details I needed to send it back to have it checked and possibly replaced or repaired. Ok cool, disappointing in that I had to send my new card away again, though it was the solution. I would have it back soon. New Magic were excellent to deal with and so was Digitan. I just thought it easier to contact the distributor to ask, moreso, if I was the problem, or if it was a hardware problem. When he said send it back to us I thought great it kinda means less steps in the process and it wasn't Digitan's fault anyway as the card was dropped shipped from Digitan's supplier (not New Magic).
All is Good
I received the card back today and got straight to reinstalling it back in the HTPC, a little nervous yet confident as well it would work like a dream. It bloody does it works exactly as I had expected, the Hauppauge Nova-T 500, sure does seem to tune lots better than the Twinhan Mini Ter I have (still a bloody good card). Both Tuners work great, I am using over the air EPG, I messed with Shepherd EPG for a little while but life is short lol, I will have another go at it soon.
Remote Control
I now have to source a remote control for the card, the early candidate is the Microsoft MCE USB remote control, kinda ironic I suppose lol. It seems to work though, plus I will just use the Learning mode of my Logitech Harmony 525, then put the remote away in storage. Please note there does seem to be 2 versions OEM and retail of this card one with a remote (retail) and one without (OEM), you can buy the Hauppage genuine remote control separately, quite reasonable too! ;o)
Conclusion
So far I highly recommend the Hauppauge Nova-T 500 MCE TV tuner card. It costs a little more but is well supported by MythTV and works very well! I can now watch TV and record something at the same time, bloody marvellous ;o)
MythTV Wiki Entry
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV_Nova-T_500_PCI
Linux TV Wiki Entry
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_WinTV-NOVA-T-500
New Magic Australian Distributor
http://www.newmagic.com.au/products/Hauppauge/Internal-Products.asp
After doing quite a bit of reading up on this card, I tried everything when the first card wasn't working, in the end it was a good thing because I learnt quite a lot about this card.
Configuration Details
After setting up everything I noticed I was getting BER errors which was causing artifacts and popping on ABC channels, I found out that one suggestion which I had tried before and of course made no difference with the dodgy card was to edit sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options
(Very Important Turn on the onboard amplifier or you will get very poor signal strength.)
and add the lines below
# mythtv
options dvb-usb-dib0700 force_lna_activation=1
options dib3000mc buggy_sfn_workaround=1
option usbcore autosuspend=-1
I added that lines above and tried it without the lines, it definitely seemed to fix the problem so far anyway. So if you get BER errors try adding the lines. It switches on the the onboard amplifier for reception.
