[aclug-L] Re: MythTV et al (was Re: Ideas for June Meeting?)

[James Lancaster <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 12 June 2005 03:31 pm, Matt Pankratz wrote:
> 
> Does the Hauppauge 250 do HDTV?  If not does anyone know of a good HDTV
> capable card that works with Myth?
> 

No, the only thing last I looked supporting HD was the PCHDTV (linux-only) 
cards. However, they only support over the air or (potentially with future 
drivers) unencrypted ones.

I've got no idea on Cox's digital: encrypted or not.

> ironrose said:
> > I recommend the Hauppauge 250 tuner card, it is the standard that MythTV
> >  was made for.  The CPU needs to be about 2Gb or more.  I would suggest
> > 512Mb of RAM.
> 

Actually, the requirements with an Mpeg2 card (PVR-X50s) are much lower. 
Decoding mpeg2 is easy now, any P2 or so should work for playback, even 
assuming the drivers, such as Via's, Intel's, or Nvidia's don't directly 
support it/speed it up. The reason the MPEG2 cards might require more, is 
being able to stream the data to the disk (MPEG2 is large, but anything 
semi-recent shouldn't have any problem), and reencoding it to a less large 
standard. (On my PVR150, for good quality it takes ~2GB/hour in MPEG2, which 
can be recompressed by mencoder to be much much less (also depending on how 
much quality you don't mind losing.) 

You essentially need CPU IF:
1) Non-MPEG2 card (bt8x8 and similar)
2) Not a lot of space, and you wish to transcode.
3) You wish to apply video filters (to clean it up) on playback. 

I'd recommend the PVR150, as it's essentially a PVR250 redesigned to cost 
less. Output is pretty good. (Certainly better than my bt8x8s) 

James L.

-- This is the discussion@xxxxxxxxx list.  To unsubscribe,
visit http://www.complete.org/cgi-bin/listargate-aclug.cgi