[mythtv-users] New to list - simple questions

[Steve Adeff]

On Tuesday 22 November 2005 18:34, Greg Oliver wrote:
> 1.  I have a PC with nvidia hooked to HDTV - works fine.  When I rip a
> dvd using myth-dvd, is it transcoded to the res of the attached TV?
> Since mtd ids required to run and does not show command line options for
> ffmpeg, I cannot see what it is actually doing.

I believe not, and if your ripping DVD's for playback on HDTV you won't want 
to do any transcoding as you'll degrade the quality without filtering and 
good knowledge of what filtering to do to increase resolution. Your better 
off just ripping the DVD and using mplayer's filtering and scaling magic to 
take you to 1080i on playback.

> 2.  I am also going to convert my xbox (where else can you get an HDTV
> out computer for less than $100), but have read a lot about slow
> processor choppiness.  If all recordings are done a another PC, will it
> play them back smoothly?

The XBOX will not be able to handle a HDTV MPEG2 file. period. don't bother 
trying. It can do DVD->1080i though, as well as XviD->1080i (depending on the 
XviD resolution). It can do SD fine as well.


> 3.  I have multiple capture cards in one machine, can I specify card1 to
> always record programs from over-the-air - card2 to record from
> DishNetwork, card3 to watch live tv, card4 to record on demand?

you can specify sources, and you can setup priorties to keep 1 card from being 
used for recording when possible (ie i you have 4 cards you have to make sure 
to never have more than 3 recordings). You can also tell Myth what channels 
each source has.
OTA: tell Myth the only channels this card has available are OTA.
Dish: Set up the card so that Myth knows its your Dish box and tell it the 
channels you have subscribed.
On-Demand: just tell myth the only channels this source has is the on-demand 
channels(so if its your cable-box connect the device and make all channels 
invisible for this input except the on-demand channels).
LiveTV: set this input to have the lowest priority and make sure you don't 
have a recording that will use this input.

Steve