Finally MythTV is running... sorta mostly

Some weeks ago I tried getting MythTV to run in a KVM guest without much luck to say the least. Today I set forth to install MythTV on the KVM host itself and get my Hauppauge Nova-T PCI card and Terratec Cinergy T5 USB stick to work.

This lead me through all kind of troubles and getting all the pieces to work together was not exactly easy. It turned out that the tuners on the PCI card and USB stick worked quite unreliably. At one point actually causing all KVM guests to segfault.

Between a lot of reboots it sometimes appeared that some of the tuners worked and I actually got to mess with XMLTV for Denmark. Somewho the xmltv ebuild doesn't seem to properly support any current grabbers for .dk (or I was blind). Anyway the tv_grab_dk_dr_2009 script seems to work, and support quite a lot of channels.

After getting XMLTV to kind of work I got back to messing with MythTV and discovered that eventhough the mythbackend thought that it was recording, no recordings showed up on disk.

Turns out that dmesg was filled with dib0700 I2C read/write failed errors and w_scan wouldn't find any channels until the system was rebooted. One posting proposed to add a slight delay when changing channels. I rebooted and tried that but still the same, soon the tuners would be unresponsive again. Though this time the errors hadn't completely filled up dmesg so I also found another

error: ehci_hcd 0000:00:13.5: force halt; handhake ffffc90000034024 00004000 00004000 -> -110

That lead me to another posting proposing to use the the slightly older 1.1 firmware (dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw) and setting a few module options. This actually seems to have solved the problem, though the Nova-T card is not able to tune to any channels. Now it can record and I can watch live TV as well. Still there are some minor problems with some of the new Danish channels and the frontend, but now most of basic stuff is finally working.