Tuning SBS using MythTV and a DVICO Capture Card on Ubuntu in Brisbane

I’ve been fiddling around with Ubuntu + MythTV for a while on the Small Form Factor machine I’d previously been carting around the country for gigs. After a reasonably excessive number of reinstalls, I finally got both MythTV and Boxee working, with the caveat that I couldn’t tune SBS, Australia’s second-best TV channel behind ABC.

It turns out that MythTV’s channels.conf file doesn’t quite work for some people. After Googling around multiple times in the intervening months since installation, I finally discovered the solution for various people has been to slightly change the frequency that MythTV searches. For Brisbane it changes to 585791667.

To edit this, open MythTV Backend Setup. Go to Channel Editor > Transport Editor

My MythTV setup shipped with 5 transports.

585500000 is for SBS in the UHF frequency band. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t tune for me. So it needs to be updated to 585791667.

After saving this and re-scanning, I got SBS1, 2, 3, 4 and HD showing up in my Channel List! Superb.