Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD 500 PCI in Linux and MythTV

I recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD 500 PCI to use in a Linux machine. I was planning to use Debian testing/unstable AMD64, and may still do so, but at the moment I’ve settled on Ubuntu Jaunty.

I don’t think I managed to get the card working in Debian stable (lenny). However, the card was picked up and the two tuners were assigned devices when using Ubuntu Jaunty.

Unfortunately, it still didn’t pick up the IR device so the remote didn’t work. I spent quite some time trying to figure this out but eventually it was solved by simply compiling and installing new dvb modules from the v4l-dvb mercurial repository as there was some IR-related code missing from the dibcom 0700 source that is now present in the head of the mercurial repository.

I also added a file to block HAL from picking up on the IR device as this supposedly causes problems. I don’t know if it does, but I did it anyway. See here for information on the fdi file that blocks HAL.

Other than that, Ubuntu does a pretty good job of getting the LIRC settings right. The only thing that’s needed is a ~/.lircrc which I created from here.

And finally, to get the MythTV frontend to run without complaints (it has an aversion to pulseaudio at the moment) I had to disable pulseaudio completely.

If MythTV is too difficult to set up for you, I have also used me-tv and a fellow FFmpeg developer also works on a couple of programs with great potential called Showtime and Tvheadend. It functions in a similar way to MythTV in that you run Tvheadend as a DVR backend and then run Showtime as a graphical frontend for actually consuming the media. It does need some polish and some more features, but it’s sooooo easy to set up I will definitely be following it’s progress and maybe contributing to the code myself.