[mythtv-users] Laptop tuner card

[Abre Chase]

I'm using the Plextor on an old P3-500 and the motherboard is a total
piece of crap (Acer).  I've got 384MB RAM.  Suprisingly, it all works
really well.  Since the Plextor does hardware encoding, you don't need
too much horsepower.

I did upgrade my video card to an nvidia 5200 ($35), which is probably
not an option on your laptop.  I'm not sure how much its really
helping me since its on an AGP 1 slot.

MPEG4 is working great with the Myth frontend. 
LiveTV/Recording/Playback all work great.  I'm running the frontend on
the same underpowered machine as the backend.  It is a little slow to
scroll the program guide, but that may be a remote control/lirc
latency issue.

I can't get the xbmcmythtv frontend on the xbox to play the mpeg4
files though.  Both xbmc and xbmcmythtv are in active development - so
I may have an unstable build of either.

Overall, my experience with using the Plextor unit with MythTV has
been very good.

- Abre

On 11/9/05, Brandon Sherman <mechcozmo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting...
> So, a USB 2.0 card (would also allow a card reader to work for
> photos, etc.) and the Plextor?
>
> > MythTV supports the Plextor out of the box...so to speak.  One
> > limitation I've found is that although the unit can natively encode
> > mpeg2, MythTV only supports mpeg4 on the Plextor.  In my case, I've
> > been trying to setup xbmcmythtv as a frontend, but it doesn't appear
> > to work so well with mpeg4.
>
> The laptop is a Pentium III 500 MHz with some amount of RAM but
> easily upgradeable to 512MB.  From reading the various websites, it
> seems like a P-III is the bare-bones minimum for a basic T.V. card
> without hardware encoder support.  I think that the MPEG-4 only will
> be ok, but you aren't clear as to how well it works with MPEG-4.  Is
> it xbmcmythtv with the problems or is the normal frontend also
> slightly buggy?
>
> The laptop has video-out, which should work fine considering it just
> mirrors the internal display which is slightly... not working.  Hence
> this project.
>
> If I have any more questions, you can be pretty sure that I'll be
> asking them on the mailing list here or in some forum somewhere.
> N00bie is I.
>
> Thanks everyone,
> Brandon
>
> On Nov 9, 2005, at 6:08 AM, Abre Chase wrote:
>
> > I've been using the Plextor ConvertX with Myth.  It does have linux
> > drivers.  I've been using it with Suse 9.3.
> >
> > http://oss.wischip.com/
> >
> > http://forums.divx.com/groupee/forums/a/frm/f/996105602
> >
> > I'm not currently using it with a laptop, but I've got a friend who
> > does.  If your laptop doesn't support USB 2.0, you can just throw a
> > PCMCIA card in there.
> >
> > I picked up my Plextor unit on ebay for about $100 used.
> >
> > - Abre
>
> > mythtv-users mailing list
> > mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>
>