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.

The PVR-350 card came with a remote control (as seen in an image in this post), model number A415-HPG (found under its batteries). I selected "Hauppauge Remote" (16) and then "Grey Remote" (b) when setting up MythTV.

After that lirc will see the remote through the IR sensor but the buttons are not mapped correctly. Using the lirc config files in the post by Russ in this thread will fix most of the mappings – though there is still some tweaking to be done.

The actual install of KnoppMyth went pretty smoothly. I use the Systm Episode 2 video as an overview for the basic configuration. The only thing they didn’t cover was the Myth setup for the PVR-500 card. The trick (as documented here) was to configure each of it’s tuners as a separate video device (ie: /dev/video0, /dev/video1) with both using Tuner 0.

The PVR-500 card contains dual tuners and that makes it longer than a 1/2 PCI card length. It ends up being just a little more than 1 cm longer than the PCI card cage used in the Dell.

I pulled the cage of the riser card and tried the PVR-500 in the Dell with the case closed. If you squint you can see that the card just fits. It’s a tight squeeze. The power connector for the hard drive is just touching the edge of the card:

To get the card to fit, I had to remove a chunk of the metal card cage.

Card cage before:

Card cage after:

And with the PVR-500 installed:

Bits and pieces have been trickling in for the past couple of weeks and I’m ready to start playing.

Hey! Why is it I can get next day delivery from Texas, but I order something from Mississauga and it takes nearly 2 weeks to arrive?

Anyway, here’s the PC:

The PVR 350 and 500 cards:

Big-honk’n-hard-drive, dvd burner, and ram: