[kwlug-disc] Configuring a WinTV-HVR-1600

[Adam Glauser]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Raul Suarez <rarsa at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am not a "TV" guy so there are several things that have me confused:
> - The card documentation says that it does not receive digital cable.

IIRC, digital cable signals are usually encrypted, so if you want to
tune these channels on your card, you'll need to connect the cable box
to your card and use an IR blaster so Myth can change channels when it
needs to.

> - I have rogers cable and I'm paying for Digital cable. If I use the Rogers box I get all the channels. If I do not use the rogers box I just get the lower channels. Does that mean that I always receiving digital cable even without the box and I cannot use this card? or if I'm not using the box I am actually getting analog cable and I should be able to use this card?

I think your second guess is right.  I'm pretty sure that with digital
cable you also get the analogue basic cable, which is why you only see
the lower channels.  Your card should be able to tune those channels
just like your TV can.

> - What type of NTSC should I select for Canada?

NTSC-M.

> On the Linux side
> - What could be the problem in Linux where MythTv do not recognize the device. At first dmesg showed that the vmalloc was too low so I set the kernel parameter to 256MB. Now I don't get that message but MythTv still does not see it.

I have a card that uses the cx88 drivers.  I'm not sure how much
similarity there is between cx88 and cx18, but one thing I had to do
was add some settings in one of the modprobe .conf files to add an
option to insmod for the driver.  The options specified the 'sub-type'
for my card.  I think it took quite a bit of searching and forum/wiki
reading to find the correct settings.

HTH,
Adam