I have been running an HTPC since long before I got a projector.
Mostly I have been using it to watch DVD with SPDIF (TosLink), I have a Media server with ~1 TB of DVD ISO files
This works great in just about any OS (Win2k, XP, Vista)
No that I am running the HTPC as the only input source for the projector in the living room I want to watch a little tv on it also. I have been running a leadtek TV2000 XP for about 4 months now, that works fine for SDTV but it doesn't do HD.

I recently bought a KWORLD ASTC 115 from newegg. It is MCE and Vista certified and it comes with TotalMedia 3, it was ~$75 so not much risk of blowing a lot of money on something that doesn't work out.

I installed XP MCE the night before I got it (knowing full well that XP MCE doesn't support QAM)
After I installed the card, driver and MCE encoder I went on with setting MCE. It got analog off the cable just fine. Satisfied with that I proceeded to set up TotalMedia, My plan was to use MCE to view analog SDTV and TotalMedia to view QAM HD. TotalMedia installed just fine and scanned 268 channels off my cable. Most of the HD channels were locked of course, I was only expecting to be able to watch CBS, ABC etc. all of which seem to work fine.

Once I returned to MCE to watch SDTV MCE became unstable and wouldn't show the channels. I tried disabling the little TotalMedia tray app and everything, I was basically not able to use MCE again after total media was installed.

So I was on the net reading some stuff about Myth when I encountered a post where a user was comparing their Vista experience with Myth. The post seemed to indicate that Vista was now supporting QAM somehow even though everything else I read said that it doesn't. So I figure to hell with XP I'll just go off and install a dual boot Vista / Ubuntu Myth

Vista install and Ubuntu install were a snap of course and once I messed with GRUB for a couple minutes I had the 2 playing nice together in dual boot.

So I set off to get Vista configured. The b-Endspirer drivers and KWorld drivers installed nicely in Vista. Then loaded up the media center app and started to get that configured. Well the media center app wanted to scan for OTA HD nothing else, In XP Media Center I could choose, after messing with it for a couple hours I couldn't get the damn thing to scan for regular analog cable much less QAM. Well now I wanted to do what I normaly do because it was dark and Saturday night so I loaded up a DVD in Daemon tools and proceeded to play it in Media Center, that lasted about 30 seconds because the video was all sorts of choppy and the sound was skipping.

Back to trusty old power dvd and after a little configuring in the sound settings and enableing hardware accelleration for video the playback was sort of ok, one very annoying thing though the sound would skip every few minutes. It wasn't bad enough that I couldn't watch the movie but it wasn't very great either.

So once the movie was over I said to hell with Vista, so I booted into Ubuntu to see what I could get out of that and Myth. Well I had problems right away because apparently ALSA doesn't support the CMedia 8788 chip yet. I was trying to get / config Myth anyway which was giving me some problems with dependecies and crap and by this point I was tired so I went to bed.

So here I am today starting from scratch again. I put some better hard drives (SATA) in the HTPC and i am installing XP MCE since I was more happy with that than Vista (at least the DVD playback worked in XP)

I will Give Ubuntu/Myth another go once i get this all configured up. I am thinking I will put an older CMI 8768 card in there to use with Ubuntu and disable that card in windows.

Also I am starting from scratch with the Edgy DVD image of Ubuntu instead of the old image I had before.

Bah!


Anyone have any ideas on getting the b-Enspirer / CMedia 8788 workin in Linux?

Anyone have a good step by step on getting Myth going on latest Ubuntu?

I highly recommend using Fedora Core (I've used 3,4,5 but 6 is most recent at the moment) for Mythtv and follow Jarod's Guide. I've used it for all my installs and everything works great. No dependency issues with Fedora Core 'cause you type and it installs mythtv along with any dependencies needed. Piece of cake. I've currently got two mythbackend systems going and two frontends going (three systems, one frontend, one backend and one slave backend/frontend) running Fedora Core 5 on all of them.

ok I've got my Fedora Core 6 DVD downloading now

I ran out of blank CDs but I have a ton of DVDs so...

I will have it down in about 3 hours and I will install it tonight.

Do you use a high end sound card? I really want to get the TosLink working mainly because the PC is very far from the receiver and I don't want to run a bunch of analog cables up to it when I already have fiber going there.

I use coax spdif (looks like an RCA plug) cause that's what on my motherboard. I believe there is a section in that guide that explains how to set up the .asoundrc file (I can't imagine where else I got that info). As I eluded to, I use onboard sound since I'm using digital. If I were to use analog, I would go with a separate sound card. But the config should be the same whether it's optical or coax digital audio.

an alsa developer seems to think the cmipci driver should work if forced to.. you can always do what I did while I waited for my chipset to be supported. I bought a usb card by turtle beach the audio advantage micro for $30 that passed digtal optical without any settings changes.