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I just got a pchdtv 3500 card for my TV. I seem to have it more or less working. Some of the problems (funny colored lines and squares on the picture, funny clicks in the sound, not as many stations as I'd expect) will probably go away if I get a better antenna. I'm just using an old rabbit ears, now. I live in Cambridge; I can see the Prudential Center (where I hear a lot of the stations have antennas) from the third floor window. Does anyone in a similar situation have an antenna they recommend? Or one they found didn't work? And what store (online or bricks-and-mortar) would you go to for expertise on this topic? Some of the other problems probably need either more configuration time or better hardware. I didn't manage to configure MythTV at all. The configuration program took over my whole screen, and I found it hard to navigate, and I couldn't get to a browser window to get advice while I had the window open. If the real program interface is as unfriendly as the configurers (both front end and back end), I'm not sure I want to bother. Is there a magic word for at least telling it to be in a window, and not full-screen? So what I'm running is "mplayer dvb://", with a channels.conf file that I created with: scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/atsc/us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB (This is on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, with dvb-utils installed. I find the dvb-utils programs work a lot better than the atsc-tools from the pchdtv site. Another thing I learned after more fussing than I wanted to do: if you're having trouble getting the atsc stuff to work, do "modprobe cx88_dvb".) This works pretty well on the pictures, but some of the sound is really garbled (not just a few clicks, but a completely foreign language) or really out of sync. Sometimes when this happens, mplayer tells me: Too many video packets in the buffer: (110 in 8502907 bytes). Maybe you are playing a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed? For AVI files, try to force non-interleaved mode with the -ni option. I don't find the -ni option helps with this. Does this mean I need better hardware? I have a year-old AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ system, with a gigabite of memory. I was hoping that would be good enough. Or do I need to download more mplayer codecs? Anyway, if you've gotten something like this working usably, I'd be glad to hear about your experiences. -- Laura (mailto:lconrad-O0WJhd4tT3hg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org , http://www.laymusic.org/ ) (617) 661-8097 fax: (501) 641-5011 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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