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

Matt Vollmar matt at vollmars.com
Fri Dec 17 15:05:05 UTC 2004


Kevin Kuphal wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________

Somehow I doubt this will work so well even with a lower resolution.  I 
have a Celeron 2.4 GHz and it barely copes with Live TV at the settings 
you list.  If it DOES work, then I have some other problem.  I hashed 
through this pretty thoroughly on the list 2-3 months ago.

Matt


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list