This week I started working on a new project: MythTV, a PVR. Some even call it TiVo on steroids. For this I’m using my old Pentium pc and I started using Sweety’s old one as my ‘normal’ pc. Sweety clearly doesn’t need a pc anymore :)
The only new hardware I needed was a TV Tuner. I decided to buy a Hauppauge PVR350.
The first two steps where to decide on and download software and insert the PVR350. I picked KnoppMyth for the installation. The other option I had considered was to install Fedora and then install MythTV manually. But since I’m no Linux expert I hoped the KnoppMyth would be easier to install. And it’s a much smaller distribution, hence smaller download.
The first problem I ran into was with the PVR350. I inserted the card, with Windows XP still on my system. As a quick way to test the hardware. Good thing I did. XP could not find the new card. After checking the BIOS, and inserting the card in every pci slot, XP still couldn’t find any new hardware. As a final test I inserted the card in another pc. The good news: the card works. The bad news: why? Finally I found a setting in my BIOS that empty pci slots would not be powered. Apparently my Bios thought whatever pci slot the PVR350 was in to be empty and decided not to power it. No wonder XP could not find it after that. With that solved, I started the installation of KnoppMyth….
