[mythtv-users] PVR Hardware
Joe Votour
joevph at yahoo.com
Thu May 5 21:14:09 UTC 2005
MythTV itself imposes a three (or so) second delay
from live TV. This is not necessarily caused by the
capture card itself, more than to have video in the
ringbuffer when you activate the PVR functions (i.e.
rewind, pause, etc.).
I can only recommend Hauppauge PVR-x50 cards (PVR-500
counts as 2x PVR-150), for hardware encoding (I have
not tried one of the Plextor USB units). The BTTV
cards will not give you hardware encoding (they
basically dump a series of frames, which software has
to assemble into something useful).
I use a combination frontend/backend machine, but I
used to use an XBox as my frontend. I gave up on the
XBox mainly because even though I replaced the GPU fan
with a heatsink, the main fan was still too noisy
(much noiser than my backend). Also, it had a lag
when I started watching something, be it live or
recorded (on the order of five seconds to start the
playback).
-- Joe
--- James Rose <james at stubbornroses.com> wrote:
> This may have been answered many times already, but
> searching the lists
> (and google) didn't seem to help too much.
>
> I'm wanting to build a distributed myth setup (ie
> one mythbackend and two
> mythfrontends), and I'm wondering:
>
> 1) What is the best recording card to use? I've got
> lots of experience
> with Hauppauge PVR-350s (I built a 4 channel
> recorder..w/o myth), but I
> find the delay completely unacceptable for live tv.
> I haven't played with
> IVTV since version 1.9, so maybe this is fixed
> (seems to be a hardware
> issue though). Acceptable delay to me is <1 second.
> I'm willing to trade
> quality for speed here since I'm recording analog
> cable to begin with. My
> only other requirement is that it does hardware
> recording, since this box
> is also my web/mail server (machine is a 2.8GHZ AMD
> with 1GB RAM, and
> 400GB IDE with RAID6/LVM on Debian Sarge). In
> addition, I plan on having 3
> recording cards in the box. Are the BTTV devices in
> general faster than
> IVTV? Can all this even be accomplished at this
> point in time?
>
> 2) What's the best compromise for mythfronend
> systems. I've read a lot of
> mixed reviews on using xboxes/ps2s. I'm wanting
> something really cheap
> (around $200/box), and extremely quiet. I'd like
> fanless, and may skip
> the hard drive and go with flash memory.
>
> MTIA,
>
> James
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
>
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
Yahoo! Mail
Stay connected, organized, and protected. Take the tour:
http://tour.mail.yahoo.com/mailtour.html
More information about the mythtv-users
mailing list