Step 3: Configure MythTV

As the mythtv user, run the following.

For first time setups, and if you want to start over again, answer Yes to both "Delete my card settings" and "Delete my channel settings".

Go through each of the 5 options in order.

1. General

On the first page, you can leave the defaults alone if you plan to only have one MythTV system.

On the 2nd page, Host-specific Backend Setup, setup the Directories as you see fit. Obviously if you have a partition that is very large, you should use that to store recordings and Live-TV buffers.

Next page, select your TV format, since this site is targetted towards PAL TV users (such as New Zealand/Australia), I'm assuming you are going to select PAL here.

The VBI format should again be PAL, and Channel frequency table should be set to your country (eg New Zealand).

Time offset should be set to your usual timezone offset (New Zealand is +1200).

The next few pages you can pretty much ignore for now, as you if you are reading this guide, you are trying to get things working for the first time, come back and visit this stuff much later.

2. Capture Cards

Second tuner setup, click to enlarge.

Now the fun stuff begins. Select "New capture card", to setup a new card. The card type should be "MPEG-2" Encoder card (PVR-250,PVR-350)" (its ok, the PVR-500 is similar to those cards). The video device should be set to /dev/video0, and the default input should be set to Tuner 0.

Now, since we are configuring a Hauppage PVR-500 card, we need to configure the second tuner/encoder on the card. PAY ATTENTION HERE.

The PVR-500 has two tuners and two encoders stuffed onto one card, the first card is /dev/video0 and Tuner-0, but the second card is: /dev/video1 and Tuner-0. Note that that is tuner ZERO. So now select "New capture card" again and put /dev/video1 and Tuner-0 in the applicable fields.

3. Video Sources

Video Sources define what is coming in the various tuner cards, for simple setups in New Zealand, this is probably a TV antenna connected to the tuner, and therefore its Free-to-air TV. If you have SkyTV or a cable TV setup, then it gets a touch more complicated, and I would suggest you setup free-to-air TV first, and work on SkyTV later.

Much like tuners, click "New video source". For the Video source name enter where the video input is coming from, eg "Free-To-Air".

As for the XMLTV listings grabber, since there is no current EPG source for New Zealand, just select Australia here, when you click Finish, it will produce an error, which you can ignore.

As you exit these settings, mythtv will attempt to download the EPG and will be prompted to run mythfilldatabase --manual. If you are following the howto, plan to use, and have installed reven.co.nz's xmlTVNZ.exe program, then at this stage, exit the setup program, and run the following in the mythtv home directory (assumed to be /home/mythtv here)

The script will prompt you for each channel it finds. Most of the settings should be straight forward, but when it asks you for channum, you need to enter the channel frequency number (see the Channels section on this site for how to obtain your regions channel numbers).

4. Input connections

This part is very straightforward, select /dev/video0 Tuner 0 and change the Video source to the source you named above, and do the same for /dev/video1 Tuner 0 (note; Tuner 0 not 1).

5. Channels

And now we reach the final part of setting this up.

Hopefully all the TV channels from your xml feed should already be here, if not, run the steps above again.

Go through each TV channel and tweak any details you like, note that the XMLTV ID is the name that the XML source uses to identify that channel. If you have selected the wrong frequency number for a given channel, change it on Page 2 of the channel settings (hit Next).

Contact me: zaf@nrc.co.nz with any updates or suggestions, or maybe questions if they are intelligent ones.