Well my all encompassing MythTV box is finally nearing completion! It still needs a little bit of new hardware (BIG HDD and new vid card) to go in, but its bascially done. It’ll show and record digital TV, has a pretty Web interface for when I forget to tape something before I leave the house, play normal video files and music and tell me the weather in the morning.

I have to admit though, the whole thing was a huge pain in the ass to get working right. The DVB tuner card in it (DVico Dual) probably caused the bulk of the problems as the drivers for it are in a constant state of flux. Once I got that working, the only other tricky thing was channel tuning. This really should be a simple procedure but until MythTV includes something that will actually scan transponders automatically rather than requiring the correct transponders first, then its always going to be difficult.

For this reason, I’m providing a quick set of instructions for anyone else in Ballarat (Victoria, Australia) who is trying to setup a box like this.
Note that these are tuning instructions only and assume that your tuner card is already operational and that you have MythTV installed:

1. Firstly, grab this tuning file that I created for Ballarat
2. Run ‘scan au-Ballarat‘. You should see it pickup the various digital services from each channel. If not then it means that you’re reception is no good or you are picking up from a different transmitter. Either way you might as well stop now as the rest of the instructions won’t work
3. Execute the following command:
   ‘scan -5 ~/au-Ballarat |cat ~/channels.conf – |grep -v :0:0:[0-9]*$|sort |uniq > ~/channels.conf’
   This will produce a channels.conf file that MythTV can import.
4. Run ‘sudo mythtv-setup‘
5. Select the bottom option, Channel Editor
6. Select Scan for Channels
7. Change the scan type to ‘Load from channels.conf’ and enter the absolute path to the channels.conf file you created above (Note: Relative path names do not work)
8. Start the scan. That should find you all the channels and add them in.If you want
9. If you want to include guide data, you will need to add the XML TV id’s as well. These can be obtained by running:
   “tv_grab_au –list-channels –loc VICReg –srv freesd” (You can change the freesd to freehd if you’re using High Def channels as well
   If you don’t have tv_grab_au you can obtain it from: http://www.onlinetractorparts.com.au/rohbags/xmltvau/
10. Finally, exit mythtv-setup and pull down the guide data:
    ‘sudo /etc/cron.daily/myth-backend‘ or
    ‘sudo mythfilldatabase‘
    Note: The above is on an Ubuntu system so the path to your cron files may vary.

And hopefully that should get you to the watching TV stage. Good luck!