[mythtv] WinTV PVR-250 (hardware mpeg encoder)

Dr. J. S. Pezaris mythtv-dev@snowman.net
Fri Jan 10 04:19:13 EST 2003


    From: Isaac Richards <ijr@po.cwru.edu>
    To: mythtv-dev@snowman.net
    Subject: Re: [mythtv] WinTV PVR-250 (hardware mpeg encoder)
    
    On Thursday 09 January 2003 11:07 am, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote:
    
    > The output from this card is great, and I believe it would be a wonderful
    > way of promoting MythTV considering the cost of the card (around $140) and
    > the features of MythTV.
    
    And you can buy a cpu that will produce better quality video with higher 
    compression for $50.  I'm not really interested in the cards. =)
    
I think the larger point is being missed here.  With a low horsepower CPU,
you can think about small, low-power, fanless Myth implementations.  A
larger CPU requires a bigger, noisier fan, and a bigger, noisier power
supply, and a bigger, more expensive chassis.  The catch is that a low
horsepower CPU requires hardware support for at least one of
encoding/decoding, if not both.  The recently released VIA EPIA
motherboards (with equivalent of 500 MHz Pentium III processors) are
screaming to be built into a Myth box (TV out, network and video on-board,
digital/analog audio out, fanless, small, and inexpensive), but they don't
have the horsepower to do real-time software encode/decode on video
streams.

I know it's possible to work really hard and get a decent-looking
desktop-sized case with a heavy-hitting processor that is reasonably quiet,
but the solutions quickly become expensive.  I don't see having separate
encode and decode boxes being very interesting as there are already
commercial one-chassis attractive and quiet implementations (like TiVo)
that work just fine for much of MythTV's functionality and aren't that
pricey.  Having an encoder farm networked to a series of display clients is
all well-and-good for the small number of people for whom that solution is
interesting.  I suspect that far, far more people will want something like
I've described: a small, attractive, silent (or nearly so) one-box
solution.

In sum: I think suporting harware encoding/decoding in MythTV is not just a
good idea, but a critical one.

That's my two cents.

       - pz.

-- 
John Pezaris, Ph.D.
pz@hms.harvard.edu




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