[mythtv-users] Hardware Question

[Len Reed]

Dex West wrote:
> So I've read about people purchasing a 250 & 350.  I'm
> assuming the 250 is used for recording and 350 is used
> for playback??  That seems like a lot of money to
> spend if I have to buy both.

No, the 350 seems to be a superset of the 250: it has hardware MPEG2 
decoding as well as encoding.  The 250 has only encoding.

Now, for what I'd like to know in a similar vein.  I currently have a 
mythtv setup with a WINTV board (software encoding) on a single backend 
machine and Nvidia TV-out cards on two different frontend machines.  I'm 
considering buying a PVR250 or 350.

1. With the 350 and mythtv can I record one program and view another 
simultaneously using just that card?  Surely the answer is yes.

2. If I have a both the PVR350 and the existing low-end board on my 
network can I watch things on the 350 that I recorded (in RTJPEG or 
whatever) on the other board?  It seems that I can't, and that I'll have 
to use software decoding to an AGP TV-out card.  If so, perhaps the 
cheaper 250 makes more sense?

3. If I use mythtv's transcoding (say, to remove commercials) on an 
MPEG2 file that was made by a 250 or 350, must the resulting output then 
be non-MPEG2?


Thanks,
Len