Finally, finally, I've setup mythtv in ubuntu. It was a real ***** to get the thing working. But I thought I should probably post some of the obstacles I ran into and how I fixed them so that others don't have to spends days like I did figuring them out.

# can't change channel with tv card, plus no tv sound
I just figured out what was wrong with myth tv, it couldn't change channels because the capture card wasn't configured correctly. The for the tv didn't work for the same reason. To get it to work, I had to add these lines to the /etc/modprobe.d/aliases. Note I have a kworld capture card I think and 878 or something, anyway if you have a different card, you need to put different options in to make your card work.

alias char-major-89 i2c-dev
alias char-major-81 bttv
options bttv card=78 tuner=2 radio=1

The file says I shouldn't modify it, but it's the only file i could find that i could put the text into make it work, p.s. putting it in /etc/modules doesn't work for some reason.
p.s, some maybe useful commands, ( but i didn't use them to make this work, just had to play with the files and the text)
lsmod-lists the currently loaded modules
modprobe-adds and removes modules, also the --show-config option shows the configuration the modules follow

# adding channels to mythtv's database
after you install mythtv you need to run mythtv-setup. The last step in this program is to add channels for mythtv to use but you don't have to worry about this. If you put in the correct zapitlabs stuff, close the program, and run mythfilldatabase, then the channels will be downloaded from the zapit servers

# very important!!
to get remote frontends to be able to login to the mysql database you have to edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file and comment out the line 'bind-address = 127.0.0.1' it stops remote hosts from login into the mysql database!

P.S. sorry for the crapy spell/grammar, but I'm lazy

i think this should be added to success stories or into a howto

I agree. Could I ask you to create a Tutorial for this? It will prevent it being lost when new questions push it down the view list. I'll close this in anticipation.

Thanks