[mythtv-users] PVR-250 vs PVR-250MCE

sukeband at vzavenue.net sukeband at vzavenue.net
Tue Jun 1 15:12:48 EDT 2004


I've been using the 250mce version for about 3 months now. At 
1st I tried the 1.10-pre2 drivers which caused the card to 
capture at half framerate. So I upgraded to 0.1.10-pre2-ck70k

After the upgrade everything has been smooth sailing. 
Everyhing in myth works great, the picture's better than i 
ever had on my tv, and the playpack is smooth. I've had my 
mythbox up and running for a few weeks  now, with nothing but 
very minor sound artifacts here and there. No crashes, no 
segfaults.

The main reason i opted for the MCE was for future 
development that may happen with the intergrated radio. Which 
is one thing that can make this great sofware even greater. I 
didn't need the remote, and i assume you don't need it either 
since you already have one. The ivtv project is growing fast, 
so i'm thinking the stability will level as time progresses. 

You can get the Chris' patched drivers here.

http://kmos.org/~ckennedy/ivtv/



--------------------------------------------------------------

I am getting ready to add a second tuner card to my backend 
box. I'm going to have the cable box hooked up to one of them 
using an ir-blaster to change channels, and I intend to just 
pipe basic cable into the 2nd tuner. Since 95% of my 
recordings are off of the basic cable channels, I figure this 
ought to all but eliminate scheduling conflicts, and make 
watching live TV much easier. What I'm trying to figure out 
is which card to put in as my second tuner. I'm currently 
running a PVR-350 as my tuner card, although I am not using 
the TV out on it. That works pretty well, so I figured I'd 
add a 250 for my second tuner. The MCE version of the card 
costs about the same as the non-MCE version, and I'm 
wondering which one I should buy. I have seen that a lot of 
people are having issues getting the MCE cards to work, but I 
imagine that is a temporary issue, and that once the 1.10 
drivers are stable, the MCE card shouldn't be a problem. 
However, if there aren't any benefits to using ! 
the MCE card over the regular card, I figure I might as well 
just get the plain old 250 and not have to deal with getting 
the MCE card to work. So my question is basically this: What 
does the 250-MCE card have going for it that would make me 
want to buy it instead of a normal 250 to put in my mythtv 
box? 

Shawn Asmussen 


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