Client keeps exiting & other questions

[drewg]

Hi,

I'm a MythTV user who is converting an existing MythTV box to SageTV in order to use the HD extender. My HD extender is *still* not here (UPS claims a train derailment and delayed delivery by 3 agonizingly long days.. ). So last night I decided to try to setup SageTV so that I would at least have more of my ducks in a row when the extender arrived.

I'm running a slightly stale Ubuntu (6.10), 32-bit and have 3 ATSC/QAM tuner cards. I downloaded the latest linux server and miniclient available yesterday afternoon. I entered my license key, and started the server, then I started the client. I told it to connect to the localhost (127.0.0.1) and it found the server. I proceeded through the setup screens. However, at random times the client would exit and dump me back to the window where you select the server. It did not seem to matter whether I was running the client in full screen (which is 1080P via the Nvidia binary driver) or in windowed mode. I reconnected and got a bit further each time until finally I had at least one tuner setup.

The good news is that the setup otherwise went smoothly, and what took me 2 or 3 days to configure in MythTV back when I started playing with PVR solutions took me about 15 minutes with Sage, even with the client exiting at random. Even with the random exits, live TV works better than it ever did in MythTV.

A few other questions:

1) Can I use one tuner in QAM mode, and 2 other is ATSC mode?

2) Will SageTV be confused if the cable company screws up the Cable Virtual Channel Table (eg, channel mapping does not work)?

My cable company sometimes tends to "forget" to send the remapping info (which i think is part of the CVCT). This confused the heck out of MythTV, and caused it to not be able to tune to the channel, causing recordings to fail. I moved away from QAM at that point. However, my older HDTV had no problems with it, since it was too old to even use the CVCT (eg, it tuned to 113-1 rather than the remapped 11-1)

3) Does the HD extender itself need a direct connection to the internet, or will it suffice to have a connection just to the server, as long as the server can reach the internet?

My network has my "server" PC sitting next to the TV, on a wireless connection behind my NAT gateway. The extender will connect directly via wired ethernet to the server PC. Do I need to enable NAT on the server PC so that the extender can get to the internet?

4) What the heck is a "network encoder". If I have a windows box on my network with a PVR-150, can I somehow get my SageTV Linux server to use it to record analog cable?

Thanks!

Drew

[carlgar]

3. The HD extender does need a direct connection to the internet to do a firmware update. It does not need a direct internet connection during normal usage.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by carlgar

3. The HD extender does need a direct connection to the internet to do a firmware update. It does not need a direct internet connection during normal usage.

Great, thanks for letting me know. I set up NAT on the machine, and it seems to work according to my laptop...

Drew