A short while ago I was having lunch with someone who has a Myth TV setup when they told me that Myth had commercial skipping abilities. I’d wondered on and off about creating a setup here, though as I have a Sky+ box it always seemed a bit excessive. However, in a moment of weakness I bought a DVB card and attached it to the appropriate ariel – fired up the relevant drivers and voila! Or at least so I thought.

MythTV wasn’t as easy to setup as I thought it would be but it’s now installed and working. It records programs and mythweb works really, really well. So far I’ve been extremely impressed by MythTV and the few things I don’t full grasp yet arent enough to hinder my usage. That privilege is reserved for a more serious problem.

The DVB card I bought is a Nova-T-500 which has 2 tuners from a single antenna connection. This was part of it’s attraction. Plugging in the card was strange as it doesn’t appear as a PCI card but rather 2 USb devices. This threw me initially and led to some headscratching but I found a web page or two that helped. In order for the card to be usable some firmware is needed – finding it was an exercise until I found it via a blog post. Installing it allowed the card to work and I thought that was the end of it. That was until the first kernel oops. This has now become a regular event and one that is very annoying.

After the initial occurance the DVB card is totally useless. There have been some other people reporting this problem but so far no solutions (or none that I’ve seen). It’s a little annoying to have it so close to working – and yet be so far away!