[mythtv-users] Advice

Jon jgregor at hotpop.com
Mon Jul 28 18:22:43 EDT 2003


Just trying to figure out a few things here, first i'm going to give you a
little background because i'm not sure what kind of information you'll need
to help me out.  I get digital cable from time warner.  I have a scientific
atlanta 2100 cable box,  I have a sony KV-32HV600 a pioneer DV-525 dvd
player, and a toshiba vcr.  I also have an athlon 800 slackware linux
router, that routes to 2 windows xp machines.

Now this project started because I wanted to build a mp3-box for my living
room, like the one explained in the linux HOWTO archive or the CAJUN/HAJUN
project.  But that obviously wasn't complicated enough for me, and I've
progressed,  I would like to now make this a mythtv project.  The machine
i'm using to build this is an athlon 700, on an asus board with onboard
sound ( can't remember the exact board model but its an old slot-a one, k7v
maybe? its apollo chipset )  Now I could swap the athlon 700 chip with the
athlon 800 chip if that will be better right now my router/server doesn't
have much weight running on it and could run real smooth on 700 as well.
I've read as much as I can on the mailing list archives, but i haven't gone
back more than a month or so, so if anything I state here is answered in
other threads please just link me instead of wasting your time.  Here are my
questions.

1.  The cheapest tv-out solution I could find would be the chaintech gf2
440mx for around 50$ from newegg.  which i've heard mentioned here a few
times. is this card going to produce a decent tv-out signal? and is it
naturally supported by xv?

2.  I need to puchase a capture card, It seems that the favorite is the
wintv pvr250 from hauppauge, I am leaning towards a card with onboard
encoding because of the system i'll be using, (read 800mhz athlon at the
fastest)  I'm not really concerned with compression.  My question is will
the WinTV PVR 250 be a waste of money when the wintv freestyle will do?  I
hear its basically the same thing without the remote and such,  I don't have
a remote, but i've seen the schematics for building an lirc receiver, and
thats something I could do for alot less than the price difference on the
freestyle/250.

3.  I see that most tv tuner cards say "125 channel tuner" now will that be
a problem?  I get about 250 channels via digital cable through my time
warner box, but since i'd be switching channels on my time warner box, would
my tv tuner actually need to change channels at all?  This is something I
haven't been able to find much information on, but I imagine its a
relatively easy to answer question.

4.  I have not yet compiled myth at all, because I don't have the proper
hardware and I didn't want to waste my time trying to set it up now.  But
I've noticed that people can split the backend/frontend to different
computers, is there an advantage, disadvantage?  (100mb wired network)  I
was thinking i'd atleast be able to run mysql on my server to lighten my
load on the myth box.  is that possible?

5.  I've noticed some people saying they get mpeg2 glitches, or glitchy
playback while using timeshifting via livetv.  I'll be buying a new
harddrive from this box.  would it make sense to opt for one of the 8mb
cache drives, is that necessary, would it even help?  which is quieter,
seagate or wd?

6. Would an athlon 800 running myth tv, with a wintv freestyle and a gf2
produce quality anywhere near as close to the quality i'm getting directly
from my cablebox now? assuming i'm using svideo in from the box, and svideo
back out.

Those are all the questions I can think of now;  However if you can think of
anything that I might need to know, or care to know, given my situation
please don't hesitate to reply, as well as if you have any questions about
my setup.  Thanks for your help.
-Jon




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