This card is designed specifically to work with Linux and, as such, it works very well with MythTV. The drivers for the card are the DVB drivers, which are built in to all of the later releases of the kernel, that are used for Mythbuntu. Setup is quite simple. You should always set up the capture cards from pcHDTV as DVB cards (although, if you wish, see Recording HDTV And Analog TV Using The pcHDTV Cards, below). The choice, listed on the setup page, should be the one that says "DVB" (it may also specifically mention the pcHDTV card -- since it is so popular, it is often included as an example of a typical DVB card).
For the pcHDTV HD-5500 cards, a couple of options that you will probably want to use are:
Recording Options
Max Recordings: 1
Open DVB Card on demand: (check)
If you are getting your guide data via EIT, you might want to enable it on the pcHDTV encoder. To do so, check the EIT box:
Use DVB card for active EIT scan: (check)
If you have multiple pcHDTV cards, you could have a problem with the audio on these cards. Each card provides sound through its own Conexant CX8801 audio chip (cx88_alsa module). When multiple tuners are present the order of the sound devices as listed in /proc/asound/cards may change from one boot to the next, causing an apparent loss of sound. This can be corrected by changing (also outside of backend configuration) either /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base or for later versions of Mythbuntu, /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf:
comment out:
# options cx88_alsa index=-2
add the following (example for two cards):
# Force the order of the audio chips in pcHDTV cards.
options cx88_alsa index=1,2
To edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base, use:
sudoedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
While, to edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, use:
sudoedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
And, while we're talking about monkeying with the modules in modprobe.d, you may want to add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/options:
options dvb_core dvb_shutdown_timeout=0
You can edit this file as described above. This change will make switching between HDTV and analog TV work much better on the pcHDTV HD-5500 card.
After you've made all of your changes, you may want to reboot the system a few times to be sure that what you've done is working. One can never be too sure when the clever, little PCI bus is involved.