I finally took the time to setup MythTV to control my digital cable tuner so that I can record the digital channels above channel 60; this includes channels like IFC and the Documentary Channel that I enjoy, but I just don’t find myself watching since I’ve started using MythTV.

I noticed that there was a newer release of MythTV available in the Gentoo’s emerge system (18-r1 versus the installed 18); daring fate, I went ahead and installed it, knowing that the whole system could come crashing down and I wouldn’t be able to record anything at all…

While it was still installing, I thought “why work with just one variable?” and decided to go ahead and try to setup a second input on my Hauppauge PVR250 that is connected to the video out from my digital tuner. If things don’t work after the upgrade, the cause could be ANYTHING, and what could be more fun than a mystery? I admit it; I thought that I was really tempting fate to smack me with a stick, but I went ahead and did it anyhow, knowing full well how much trouble I could get myself into.

It worked. All of it.

Yeah, I was shocked.

The one thing that bothered me was the duplication of channels in the setup, with all of the channels available through the “digital” interface, and those under 60 through the “tv” interface. This was annoying, as MythTV would decide to record something on analog cable (under channel 60) on the digital interface, which was a bit silly. That, and for some reason, it would tune in channel 106 (BBC Canada) through the IR-blaster, but for some reason channel 92 (Documentary) would result in snow, and channel 94 (IFC) would sometimes result in a TV schedule, but would sometimes record. It appeared that the system was deciding to use the analog side of things some of the time when recording digitally.

I tried simply deleting the channels, but since the channels and listings are downloaded from labs.zap2it.com, my changes would be re-downloaded. What I really need to do was alter the listing on the Zap2It side of things, but that wasn’t so straight forward, either. I chose to delete all the channel information on my local system so that I could wipe out all the dupes in short order. The next thing that I did was set up a second acount with Zap2It that would just list my digital channels (all 6 of them that I care about). I tied that login to my digital lineup in mythtv-setup, and it worked flawlessly; no channel duplication, and just the channels that I want show up.

I overlooked one little thing, though, and that caused me a bit of grief; ensure that you restart mythbackend when you do something like re-setup all your channels. If you don’t restart it, you’ll sit there wondering why the damn thing refuses to make the IR-blaster change channels on the external tuner. Upon restarting it, I was able to browse to channels from the main remote control, and was able to make the system record the proper digital channels when I wanted it to.

Modified LIRC for controlling external tuners. There’s also the place that I bought the excellent IR blaster from; irblaster.info.