I'm trying to cut my Comcast leash and go to an HD OTA setup. I'm looking very seriously at Myth/Mythbuntu instead of a Tivo Series 3, but after a couple days of heavy googling I'm having a hard time getting a sense of how real-world ready MythTV with HD-5500 cards might be.

I see a lot of bug reports for the HD-5500 under Myth, but I'm not finding a lot of success stories and almost no reports of "it just works".

I guess my question is this: how much hacking is required to build a working Linux OTA DVR these days? It seems like things are at a stage where a lot of time needs to be invested at the beginning and regular care and feeding is required from there out. Am i wrong?

Also, can somebody tell me whether I'm correct in coming to the conclusion that the HD-5500 is the only option for capturing ATSC under linux that's still being manufactured?

I use HDhomerun for OTA ATSC (two tuners) and it works great with Mythtv. I also have a Haupaugge(sp?) 150 card for ntsc. I record as many as 3 channels at a time with no problems. I've only worked on the mythtv backend part last year when I had to change my channel scheduler feed to schedules direct. I've only tweaked the front-ends when adding x.264 support.

There are several ATSC cards supported in Linux. I have both an old Air2PC card and a Fusion card in a Mythbuntu box that works fine. The Fusion card worked right out of the box, the Air2PC needed firmware code added to Myth, then it worked great. Myth is not, and likely never will be as easy as Tivo, but it is not difficult to set up.

The HD (digital) standard that is used in Linux is called dvb. This is not to be confused with the European digital broadcast standard called DVB. Here is a list of ATSC dvb cards that work in Linux
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATSC_Devices

This is not the most up-to-date list, but it is a good start. If you already have a capture card and it isn't on the list, it may still be supported. Getting the latest v4l-dvb drivers from linuxtv.org is always advisable.

I have 2 HD-5500's in my mythbox running mythbuntu and they work great... and the drivers for those are in the current linux kernel.

The only quirks I had was linux tried loading the analog sound part of those cards above my integrated sound and I had to blacklist those cards to get sound to work, but this issue doesn't seem to affect everybody.

When you run mythtv setup make sure you pick the second option for dvb cards ( you'll know it works because it will detect the card successfully )

I see a lot of bug reports for the HD-5500 under Myth, but I'm not finding a lot of success stories and almost no reports of "it just works".

I set up my mythtv system for all digital OTA (in anticipation of the 2/2009 switch) with three HD-5500 cards (I've never used any of their analog features), and I can say unequivocally that they have always "just worked". I built my mythtv systems under Gentoo over a year ago. The stable kernel at that time (can't remember which it was...probably 2.6.21) and all kernels since have worked perfectly with them.

...and by the way...kudos on cutting the pay TV leash! My best friend loves my OTA setup and decided to have be help him put up a good antenna and do the same (we get good reception in our area). If more people did so, maybe pay tv would drop all the anti-consumer encryption crap and actually become something worth paying for.

Tom

You have to understand, people don't usually post if they are not having trouble. So most of the posts you will find are from people having problems.

The drivers for the pcHDTV cards have been included in the kernel for quite some time. You should not need to add any drivers, although many opt to get the latest versions of all TV card drivers from the V4L-DVB web site.
http://www.linuxtv.org/repo/

Most problems with the pcHDTV cards are with using the analog tuner side of the card. It is usually someone who has cable, and wants to record from the analog cable channels. This side of the cards seems to be rather poor quality, and I would advise not wasting your time on it. I just had a "discussion" about this with someone on the pcHDTV forums, read it for a few laughs. In retrospect, maybe I was a little rude to the poster, Oh Well!
http://pchdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7117