[mythtvnz] manually resetting the tuner card

[Mark van Dijk]

I have a Hauppague PVR-500 card (dual analog).  Occasionally, something 
seems to go wrong with one of the tuners, such as:
   1) no sound
   2) ok sound, but extremely poor picture quality
   3) pure static (both pic and sound)
   4) no recording file at all (i.e. MythTv has a recording entry in the 
DB, but no MPEG file on disk)

This is only very occasionally (maybe once every 2 weeks) - and 
generally (though not always) seems to occur after my box has been 
running for more than a day or two.  a simple reboot normally fixes the 
issue immediately.  Funny thing is that when the issue occurs, the other 
tuner continues to work as normal.  Once the issue starts, it will not 
go away on its own, and from then on, any recordings that use that tuner 
are no good.  This has been an issue through several clean installations 
of Mythbuntu (from 7.10 to 9.04).

It is entirely possible that I have a faulty motherboard (a very old 
Asus A7N8X-deluxe).  I have had issues for years with USB devices under 
both Linux and Windows on this machine...

Is it possible to do a software reset of the tuner card somehow so that 
i don't have to reboot the machine?  If so, then perhaps i can get 
MythTv to reset the card before each recording.

Cheers,
Mark