Peter's Blog

I have been living with the Mythical Convergence Box for nearly two weeks and have found the first batch of shortcomings:

• Recordings on Dave channel and CBeebies had intermittent noise on sound and vision, a glitch every ten seconds or so. Very irritating, even when babies are watching lazytown. Reception on Channel 4 and ITV2 were immaculate so babies watched Dora the Explorer. Once I noticed it said 49% signal strength on the banner when I changed channels I decided a more sensitive tuner was in order.
• It was programmed to record Top Gear and Dragons Den on Dave channel plus various baby programs and hence the tuner was almost always busy and unavailable for live tv.
• As a PC it is sluggish.
• The cordless keyboard is intermittent at the far reaches of my room, e.g. my computer desk.
• The commercial skipping does not work on Dave channel Top Gear is edited down from one hour to about forty minutes then they stick 20 minutes of ads on during the program (not between programs). Top Gear looks wonderful on the 42" plasma.

So I bought a hauppauge WinTV Nova-T-500 dual tuner DVB card. This has two tuners and both are (purportedly) more sensitive. It comes with a remote and an IR receiver.

Installation on Ubuntu (gutsy 7.10) was simplicity. The MythTV Wiki goes into great depth about compiling kernel modules but none of this is necessary with ubuntu it Just Works

Here are the steps I took:

• plug card in
• download firmware and copy to /lib/firmware. The link to the firmware is on this page which is more likely to be maintained than this one blog post.
• edit /etc/modprobe.d/options and add

  options dvb-usb-dib0700 force_lna_activation=1
  

• rmmod dvb-usb-dib0700
• modprobe dvb-usb-dib0700
• run

  dmesg
  

  and the ending should give some blurb about dvb loading successfully. Mine didn't first time, I had to rename the firmware file to the name it complained that was missing, then rmmod/modprobe again.
• Go into MythTV and add the two tuners as capture cards on adapters 0 and 1.

(ok maybe 'Just Works' is a bit strong).

It seems to have cured my noisy recording problems (signal strengths now about 60%) and the scheduler is recording even more voraciously now it has two tuners available: the second tuner is picking up missed lazytown while the first is recording Top Gear four times a day (it is supposed to avoid duplicate recordings but it still managed to scoop up 63 episodes in less than two weeks: maybe 'Dave' channel should have been called 'Jeremy'?).

I found I was able to watch a recording while it simultaneously recorded two other programs. That is pretty good but:

• even a 1.7 psuedogig cpu must be as good as the thing in my old sky plus box
• recording DVB-T is just a matter of dumping the mpg stream to the disk.

The recordings have subtitles which I need while exercising as my equipment, especially the exercise bike, is very noisy. I can't exercise without entertainment.

I haven't set up the remote yet but the MythTV Wiki seems to have that covered. Hopefully the remote will be more reliable in the 10-15 feet range and, more importantly, I won't be the only person in the house who can work it.