[mythtv-users] Looking for Capture Card Recommendations

[Torsten Schenkel]

On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 20:03, David Boreham wrote:
> > It has to, since it encodes video and audio into an mpeg2 stream.
> 
> Ah, right.
> 
> While we're on the subject, could you clarify exactly what
> the 250 and 350 do (of course in a perfect world, the
> guys paid big $$ to market the products would actually
> tell the customer this information...) ?

They do. But, brother we have the wrong system :-)

Hauppauge seems very Microsoftly to me. But they do build a great card
(pvr350) that doesn't have a counterpart from more linux friendly
companies, so ...

At the moment It's a great pleasure to have a feature of that card in
use that microsoft doesn't even support. GUI overlay over decoder
stream.

> The 250 is a capture card with a TV RF tuner and
> some MPEG2 encoder chip ?

yes

> The 350 is the 250 + an RF radio tuner and + a
> display device + an MPEG2 decoder chip ?

It's a decoder and TV encoder, i.e. it decodes the digital mpeg2 video
and encodes it into scanlines for a TV. The same sort of device that's
in your standalone DVD player.

> The 350's display device can make a 'proper' TV signal,
> with appropriate resolution, aspect ratio, interlace and 
> overscan ?

Yes, same quality as a consumer DVD and better than most VCRs.

> How is the 350's display output expected to be used 
> in a system ? Presumably not as the primary display
> device ? Or can I configure a system to boot X and
> display on a 350, with some random VGA card
> (on motherboard for example) to keep the BIOS happy ?

That's exactly what I do. I can't use the pvr to output divx movies
though, but that'll be certainly possible in the future.

> e.g. I have an EPIA motherboard. Can I plonk a
> 350 card in that machine and have a) hardware playback
> decode and b) a decent tv out signal and c) everything
> else not become broken ?

a) and b) certainly (I got an ME6000 here)

c) not necessarily, but most likely the ivtv driver will be the only
thing that's unstable atm. Look at ivtv.sourceforge.net and subscribe to
the ivtv-devel list to keep track.

Torsten
-- 
Config files for PVR350 TV-Out:
http://www-isl.mach.uni-karlsruhe.de/~hi93/ivtv-pvr-350-conf.tgz