[mythtv] Semi-OT: Which HDTV card to buy for Myth?

Daniel Thor Kristjansson danielk at mrl.nyu.edu
Sun Jan 30 00:03:05 EST 2005


On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, Nate Carlson wrote:
][Sorry to post this on the dev list, but afaik the air2pc card is only
]supported in CVS, so wanted to make sure I get accurate answers - feel free to
]tell me to shaddup and go to users.]

This really should be a question for the users list, but I'll answer it 
here because I think this needs to be explained by the developers.


]A few questions:
]1) As I understand it, with the air2pc card, it may be possible in the future
]to record more than one subchannel (of a single channel) simultaneously. Is
]this also the case with the pcHDTV cards?

This will be the case for the Air2PC and both pcHDTV cards fairly soon. 
Not in 0.17, but probably shortly after the release.


]2) Which card has a better chance of being able to capture unencrypted hdtv
]over cable streams (QAM?) in the future?

I don't know about the Air2PC, but I know the HD-2000 is unlikely to 
ever support QAM, while the HD-3000 will support it fairly soon. Myth 
needs a few small changes to support Cable ATSC, but I'm supposed to get 
early access to the QAM decoding, so these changes may already be in 
CVS when the QAM supporting driver is released.


]3) Anything else to keep in mind between the two cards?

The pcHDTV HD-2000 has two coax inputs so you can dedicate one input to 
NTSC and the other to ATSC, which is kind of neat. The HD-3000 only has 
one coax input but has an SVideo input. The HD-3000 also has slightly 
better ATSC reception than the HD-2000. I believe they are also both PCI 
v2.2 cards, so they do not work with all motherboards. The NTSC input is 
not currently supported when you are using the ATSC input for MythTV, 
but you can use the patches for this at:
  http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~danielk/mythtv
or wait a week or two for a simpler approach that I'm currently 
debugging in my tree.

The Air2PC has one coaxial input, and I believe it only supports DTV 
and not analog TV. However, the Air2PC is also about $30 cheaper, and 
includes a on-chip MPEG2 decoder (not currently used). It should also 
be kinder to cheap or poorly configured motherboards when recording a 
single show, since it does pid filtering on-chip.

-- Daniel


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