I am thinking of connecting my telewest cable to my pc, however how do i do this ? Which is the best PCI card to purchase and will it accept the telewest signal as I presumed the set top box decodes the signal ? So how could a internal PVR for a pc work with a cable digital signal ? Can you help ? or give me some advice ?

Thanks, Greg from Blackpool

The problem is, that there is more than one way to “configure it correctly”, and it depends on the TV input you have. Are you using terrestrial, cable or digital? If cable, is it Telewest or NTL? If its analogue, which transmitter are you using - that affects the channels use? Are you in Scotland or in Wales - that will affect the channels you can get. If its digital, is it Freeview… etc, etc…

I’ve got Telewest cable, so once I’ve finished working out how to configure that to my satisfaction, I can tell you how to configure that, but could only guess at how to do terrestial analogue, since I don’t have that setup.

I “just want to use it” too. Doesn’t come for free though, all the improvements made to MythTV over the years have come from people identifying the problems and/or fixing them,

I agree that the MythTV configs are sometimes not as easy to understand as we might like. What I’d suggest is that you make a list of the bits you don’t understand, and mail it to the mythtv-users list - you’ll almost certainly get back a helpful reply which will help you, and if, once you understand the answer, you can suggest a better way of expressing the config options, tell the mythtv-developers list, then they can include that in future versions.

HTH
Rachel

I appreciate that you may not have intended it to be one, but any references you could give to UK relevant configs would be gratefully recieved.

Obviously the ideal would be a mythtv configuration for Ubuntu, a PVR-350 and UK analogue TV reception. If I could get basic UK reception and channel listing going, I might have a chance of figuring out what many of the terse/incomprehensible MythTV configs actually mean, e.g. simply by toggling their values one at a time. The help messages in the MythTV GUI itself are often very unhelpful.

More importantly from a UK open source point of view, it seems silly to have everyone inventing their own wheel when it comes to configs. If just one person has figured it out already, why shouldn’t they just pass it on?

After 11 years of using Linux I am a bit tired of wasting my time hunting down a single glob of information which I need for no other purpose than to use a single application.

I don’t care how mythtv works, I just want to use it.

I don’t want to spend hours/days digging out the information for myself, when I could be spending it on something more useful (like improving my Perl, learning Python, building a web CMS, writing Debian documentation, etc).

Dave