Building a PVR: PVR-350 TV out

The Hauppauge PVR-350 card has a tuner, hardware MPEG-2 encoder, hardware MPEG-2 decoder, and TV out. By using the TV out and taking advantage of the hardware MPEG-2 decoder you can greatly reduce the load on your CPU.

However, X11 in KnoppMyth is not configured to use the TV out on the PVR-350 card by default. Luckily, there is a perl script called pvr.pl that will do this for you. First, su to root and run getpvr.pl and follow the instructions. getpvr.pl will ask you some questions and grab the correct version of pvr.pl for you.

Since there doesn’t seem to be a pvr.pl script specifically for KnoppMyth R5A26 just yet, I selected the R5A22 release instead and that seemed to work for me.

Also, the pvr.pl script will configure X11 to use the S-Video output on the PVR-350. If you need to use the composite output you’ll have to modify the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file directly.