AMD64 Based PVR: Part 1 - The Adventure Begins

Well I had an old motherboard with an Athlon64 3200+ in it (previous burnt out PSU that wasn’t quite as bad as it looked). So I bought 1 GB of RAM, a new PSU, a Hauppage PVR-500, used my old nVidia GeForce FX5900XT and a DVD drive for it. I installed Gentoo amd64 on it of course and then began my first attempt at MythTV.

I have TV out working and I can play DVDs, although I am using xine instead of mplayer for the DVD menu support. The TV tuners are recognised but all I get is static. I was working with this wiki article. I also have messages like this in dmesg, ivtv1: i2c attach to card #1 ok [client=(tuner unset), addr=61] which I think is my tuner failing to get set up properly.

It looks like the infrared receiver/IR blaster doesn’t work either, it is USB based and came with the package. I get ID 0609:031d SMK Manufacturing, Inc. when I plug it in but no lirc devices This means that the remote is also unusable. So far I have had limited success, but I am hopeful I will be able to improve and document the set up in future. I am currently using,

media-tv/ivtv-0.4.2
media-tv/xmltv-0.5.39 - current stable is unable to parse UK TV listings
media-tv/mythtv-0.18.1-r2
app-misc/lirc-0.8.0_pre3