Hauppauge dropped their prices on the PVR-350 to $150US, so a few friends and I split the shipping and bought some. A few hours later, my Myth box was up and running, and I’ve been slowly tweaking it. I ran into a few snags, which I’ll explain below.
Previously I had used KnoppMyth, but since I was keeping this one around I wanted to use Fedora like my other computers. I followed the instructions in the Step-by-step guide to building a MythTV System on Fedora Core 4 w/ATrpms, which was excellent.
The only problem I had with the document was that some yum repositories had bad keys, so I ended up changing “gpgcheck=1” to “gpgcheck=0” in /etc/yum.conf and /etc/yum.repos.d/*.
The lirc_i2c module that controls the PVR-350’s remote wouldn’t load on boot, so I added
modprobe lirc_i2c
service lircd restart
to /etc/rc.d/rc.local to load it and restart lircd on boot.
The window was too big for the TV, which meant the edges of the screen were cut off. After working on this for a while with a friend, we realized that changing the size of the X-Windows display was going to be impossible, so fixing the MythTV components was the way to go.
From within mythfrontend, go to Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> Appearance. In the second screen, I set the GUI width and offset as follows:
This makes the frontend window fit on the TV (your settings may differ). Setting the GUI size rather than 0 for automatic made things a lot easier.
Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings -> Playback , find the Overscan page. The following settings made the on screen stuff work:
Finally, fixing the TV out part was done with:
# ivtvfbctl
Syntax is:
ivtvfbctl /dev/fbX the framebuffer device for your tuner card
[-window left top width height] sets the screen area to use for video#ivtvfbctl /dev/fb0 -window 45 45 630 390
The last line was put in rc.local. The easiest way to determine these numbers is to start watching TV, and log in remotely to your MythTV box. I started off with 100 100 100 100 and worked on the top left corner, then the bottom right.
When in the menus, there are some acceleration buttons that can be checked, I checked them all. The ffmpeg stuff seemed to make the biggest difference.
It looks like Amazon has these cards for $138 plus free shipping, which is cheaper than the way we ordered it if you’re in the US.