Since I really only have the one feature missing from the Linux environment that's sufficient to keep me on Win32, I figured I'd give making the PVR software work one more try. This time I got MythTV properly configured, including the XML-TV grabber, scheduling of recording, and all of the other features I care about (though I haven't figured out how to get it to automatically encode as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, it seems to store the files in a native format).

However, I once more ran into the audio problem for the ATI TV Wonder Pro. It seems as though the audio simply doesn't work for this driver, which is weird considering it's using a patch-cable, so should just be coming in as simple audio data to be encoded... instead it's exiting the TV Wonder as a hiss of static. The hiss is interrupted by changing channels, but there's no channel that isn't just a hiss.

Reading the various howtos and postings about it, it seems that the card may not support NTSC audio with the current driver (that is, the one in the Gentoo kernel).

[A Little Later] Finally, I have just found this thread, in which someone from Canada (NTSC) with an ATI TV Wonder Pro goes from exactly my current state (static on the audio channel) to fully working. But it requires adding a new module to the kernel, not something I want to learn to do on my only functional OS at some unreasonably late hour of the night. Still, nice to know that the code is available when I'm awake enough to work with it.

For now I need to get to bed so I can be up and working at a halfway decent hour.