I had the chance to test AnySee’s USB based DVB-C tuner with MythTV, and I can confirm it “just works”.

In the middle of December 2009 danish cable TV providor Stofa made most of the channels in its DVB-C network available unencoded. This prompted me to replace my analogue Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 TV tuner card (yes the links goes to my old PVR-150 page) with something that could record the digital signal from DVB-C. I looked for a card that had the following characteristic:

I’m using Xine as the preferred video player on my MythTV frontend, because it has a nice video output driver called “xxmc”. This driver enables hardware accelerated playback of mpeg1/2 streams (e.g. ivtv recordings or DVDs) on Geforce 7xxx and other Geforce chips. The driver should fall back to the xv driver if the stream is in another format than mpeg1/2, but somehow the xxmc drives screws up playback of videos encoded with Xvid as playback gets really jerky.

My MythTV frontend depends on the masterbackend to be up and running, mainly because some partitions are nfs mounted. So I created a simple script to check if the backend is responding to ping: