[mythtv-users] Newbie needs help choosing hardware for use in the UK

[Martin Ebourne]

On Wed, 2005-01-12 at 21:45 +0000, Alexander Fisher wrote:
> Avermedia DVB-T PCI Card £64.44

>From what I hear these don't have very good reception.

> Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-T Freeview receiver PCI (909) £62.06
> Vision + PCI TV Tuner - HDTV Compatible + Remote £46.06

I have one of each of these in my system (though the nova-t I have is
the previous model). I'm pretty sure the new nova-t works well now.

In terms of the TV they both seem to work equally well. I can't do a
signal strength comparison because for some reason the statistics tzap
reports are rubbish on the Vision+, which is a shame. Doesn't stop any
of myth from working though.

The main difference between these two comes down to the remote. The
nova-t has a very nice small remote which is almost perfect for mythtv
(short of volume buttons unfortunately, though you can remap 2 other
unused buttons). The receiver for the remote plugs straight into the tv
card, so this remote will only work if the frontend has the nova-t card
in it.

The Vision+ comes with a remote that's certainly not as nice, and
unfortunately is almost entirely useless with mythtv. The receiver is
completely separate from the tv card and plugs into the usb bus, which
is a great start. Unfortunately it behaves as a usb keyboard with fixed
and somewhat useless key mappings. Maybe you could remap all the keys in
myth to suit it, but I gave up with it since it didn't work with any
other remotes anyway (eg. the nova-t one).

> Or should I just go for the cheapest?  Shouldn't the outputted MPEG2 stream
> be identical for each card?

Yes, it is. It comes down to three things:

i) driver support/quality
ii) reception
iii) remote

I'd say nova-t & vision+ are pretty close on the first two, large gap on
the third. If you're using a separate remote receiver anyway (or have
your tv cards in a separate backend) then get the cheap ones for sure.

>   The option to receive some of the top-up-tv
> channels might be good too.  Has anybody got this working yet?

Not as far as I know. But then it seems an awfully large amount of money
for virtually nothing in terms of decent programming. IMO.

> I'm hoping that the system will be capable of recording two programmes,
> whilst simultaneously letting me watch a previously recorded show on the
> xbox.  I don't suppose I'll want to do this that often but it would be nice.
> 
> Since my MB only supports UDMA-2, I'm also thinking of buying an addon PCI
> ATA card.

You don't need as much disk transfer speed as maybe you thought. Even
laptop 4200 drives would work. The MPEG stream comes out as about
500k-1MByte/second, which is massively under the 25MB/s you could expect
even from a slow disk. Recording from a DVB card to disk takes almost no
processor (it's not all that far from doing
'cat < /dev/dvb/adaptor0/video0' > /video/file.mpg'), so watching while
recording is usually a non-issue.

> I'm guessing I won't need any soundcards in a DVB only system?

Well you need to get sound out somehow - maybe the onboard is up to it,
or you could use external USB. Or maybe you want AC3 over s/pdif.

Cheers,

Martin.