[mythtv-users] disadvantages of ivtv cards????

ERIC S zaphod at comcast.net
Mon Jul 28 16:34:42 EDT 2003


You can set the  bitrate and resolution to something lower than the
default NTSC resolution of 720x480 with 8MbpsVBR/16MbpsPeak.  The
defaults are more in line with DVD rates and are probably not
appropriate  for broadcast/cable TV.

Tivo High Quality is 544x480 at about one third the bitrate if I recall
correctly and is MPEG1/2 based.  Not great for high quality archives,
but fine for time-shifting episodes of you favorite trash tv . . . . ;-)

My Tivo is on a 34" Wide Screen Monitor, its High Quality is usually not
noticable except during very fast action (explosions) when you might
notice some pixelation and artifacting.  If  you use a smaller TV you
probably need even less.

The current downside related to this is that the software encoding users
can select recording quality on a program-by-program basis.  With the
ivtv driver currently you need to set the resolution in a initializing
script and live with it for everything.  I'm sure this will be fixed in
the future as the ivtv driver matures.

Another upside to MPEG2 is possible future ability to playback using
some type of hardware based system.  There are a couple MPEG2 decoder
cards  with beta level drivers for Linux as well as the ever looming
promise that someone might get the decoder on the Via Epia-M boards
working.  I  would like to see hardware playback supported similarly to
hardware recording.  My main concern is that the VGA overlay capability
is probably still lacking in the Linux drivers and that using the
overlay might require a less than minor overhaul of the frontend.  The
end goal of course is silent set-top-boxes running low power x86
processors . . .

-Eric

----- Original Message -----
From: Russ Southern <russ.southern at cox.net>
Date: Monday, July 28, 2003 2:28 pm
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] disadvantages of ivtv cards????

> On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 10:29:05AM -0700, Harondel J. Sibble wrote:
> Content-Description: Mail message body
> > The question is...
> > 
> > What are the disadvantages (if any) of using dual ivtv based 
> cards?  I mean 
> > specifically the cards themselves and not things like remote 
> controls etc as 
> > I have that all covered.
> 
> Drive space.  You'll need lots of it, as the cards capture (unless 
> you get
> aggressive at capture time) 4GB/hour of data.
> 
> Of course, that's probably offset by the stunning quality you get...
> 
> Get big hard drive(s), or be aggressive at transcoding to smaller 
> files,copying to dvd, etc.  That's the only potential downside I 
> can think of, and
> that's pretty minor, IMO.  I run two 250's myself...
> 
> Russ
> 
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
mythtv-users mailing list
mythtv-users at snowman.net
http://lists.snowman.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list