[ubuntu-uk] MythTV with Nova-T 500 Dual card [was: Dells with Ubuntu]

[Eamonn Sullivan]

On 5/31/07, Pete Ryland <pdr at pdr.cx> wrote:
> On 31/05/07, Eamonn Sullivan <eamonn.sullivan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5/30/07, Pete Ryland <pdr at pdr.cx> wrote:
> > > contains a Hauppauge Nova-T 500 Dual card which is not 100% working in
> > > Linux yet.
> >
> > Interesting point. I was looking carefully at their dual-tuner
> > offering, since they're selling it for probably less than it would
> > cost me to build one. But I don't want to buy something that doesn't
> > work. Can you be more specific about what's not working right now with
> > those tuner cards?
>
> It's implemented in hardware as a pci device containing a usb hub with
> two tuners.  There's a bug in the kernel usb-core code which causes
> kernel oopsen under certain conditions!  While the oops was fixed (in
> the latest v4l-dvb, which you'll have to compile yourself from
> Mercurial), it can still get the usb disconnect event randomly or just
> fail to read from or write to the device.  Turning off EIT (which
> contains program information encoded in the stream itself) seems to
> reduce the frequency of the failures, but it is still remarkably
> flakey even then.  Restarting myth-backend (and sometimes reloading
> the modules) is necessary to get it working again.  Rather annoying if
> you had set it to record stuff while away on holiday or something!
>
> So, basically it works well, but will stop working randomly from time
> to time, and can still sometimes cause a kernel oops.

Hmm... occassional kernel oops isn't want you want from an appliance.
Thanks for the info. Maybe i'll stick with my plan to build one (I
would have used a faster processor, and maybe latest Intel motherboard
graphics to avoid the proprietary drivers) and use an older, more
supported TV card.

-Eamonn