[mythtv-users] Cannot watch live television with budget tv-tuner card

Kevin Kuphal kuphal at dls.net
Thu Dec 16 22:58:42 UTC 2004


Søren Pingel Dalsgaard wrote:

> Hi,
>  
> I found an old Medion MD5044 tv-tuner card which I popped into my 
> mythtv as the only tuner card. I used xawtv to find the "frequencies" 
> and configured mythtv accordingly. Watching tv with mythtv works (as 
> it "it shows the right picture") but it stall all the time and get 
> further and further behind.
>  
> My system is an (old) AMD Athlon 1.1GHz machine with 1MB memory and a 
> brand new (fast?) 250Gb harddisk.
>  
> I've ordered my pvr 350 but would like to get a feeling of whether I 
> should ditch my old tuner card or leave it in.
>  
> Needless to say, it works just perfect with xawtv which doesn't write 
> everything to disk first.

The default recording resolutions and bitrates for MythTV are a bit 
high.  Try lowering the resolution to something like 352x480 and record 
using MPEG-4 at a bitrate of 2200 (1 GB / hr).  You should find that it 
works much better and then tweak the LiveTV bitrates/quality options up 
from there if it works.  You will also find that if you don't watch 
something while recording you can use higher bitrates for recorded shows 
using maybe the High Quality profile since the system will not be 
playing back at the same time.

Kevin



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