[mythtv-users] Re: Answers about pcHDTV HD-3000 support in Myth, QAM support, and more

[Preston Crow]

On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 16:15, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 03:22:23PM -0400, Preston Crow wrote:
> > In this case, you probably don't need anywhere near that fast
> > of a CPU to record HDTV.  You probably do need that to record
> > NTSC TV, which is an advertised feature.  So if all you care
> > about is recording HDTV, then you're probably fine with a much
> > slower CPU.
> 
> So for a backend-only machine that isn't using the HDTV board
> for NTSC, it wouldn't really need much CPU.

Exactly.

> > However, if you actually want to see what you've recorded, you
> > need a CPU and graphics card with sufficient combined power to
> > display HDTV-resolution MPEG-2 files, and that's no simple
> > chore.  From what I've heard, most people would consider
> > 1.2GHz to be less than half what you need, even with a decent
> > nVidia card.
> 
> But that could be a different machine, so it wouldn't require
> any extra CPU for the machine with the HDTV card.  I think the
> "system requirements" page needs to be a bit more clear on the
> difference between the requirements for using the card to
> capture a data stream and the requirements for viewing the
> resulting datastream.

Right.

> In theory, could one transcode to an MPEG-2 stream at a
> resolution supported by a PVR-350 and use that to view the
> recordings?

In theory, but I don't think Myth suports transcoding to MPEG-2.  I also
haven't had luck using the regular transcoder to mess with HDTV
recordings, but I've only tried it once.

--PC