[mythtv-users] DVB cards and encoding

[Christian Hack]

> I've been looking at Myth TV for a while and I'm trying to 
> decide what 
> hardware to buy.  I would like to buy an EPIA M10000 
> motherboard and I 
> know that they aren't very powerful for encoding.  I am therefore 
> thinking about getting a PVR250 or PVR350 card to put in it 
> to do MPEG 
> encoding.
> 
> I have also been looking at DVB cards, specifically the 
> Nova-T and I was 
> wondering if the output from this card (into the computer) is 
> MPEG(2?) 
> and if so does that mean that recording from this card 
> requires little 
> CPU power or does the data from this card need encoding in some way?

It doesn't need encoding as such. It needs "processing" though. DVB
streams can have more than one audio and video stream embedded in them.
So the software needs to strip out the unwanted streams. Since it's
essentially throwing data away, it takes very little CPU. I think some
cards can even do this themselves. Can they? I might have made this last
bit up.

On my XP2400+ nForce 1 board I can't really see it even use the CPU.
Maybe a few percent every now and again.

CH