[mythtv-users] Digital tuner card recommendations

Jared C. Davis jared at cs.utexas.edu
Sat Dec 16 06:01:29 UTC 2006


Hi,

So this HDHomeRun box can record two HD signals at once, and send them
across the network to the backend?  Is there enough bandwidth for that
on a 100-megabit wire?  I guess I don't know how large these
recordings are, but this seems really cool!  Do you even need a kernel
module, or does it just do everything using regular networking?

Thanks!
   Jared


On 12/15/06, Daniel Kristjansson <danielk at cuymedia.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 21:12 -0600, Jared C. Davis wrote:
> > I got some great advice from this list when I was looking for a video
> > card, so I'm hoping to repeat the experience. :)  My ideal card would
> > be easy to install and configure, reliable, and cheap (in that order).
> >  I am tentatively looking at the pcHDTV 5500, which seems to be about
> > $135 USD (shipped) from pchdtv.com.  But I have no idea if these are
> > good cards or if there are better ones.
> These are good cards. But they apparently do require you to have
> a decent power supply; I've never had a problem though. You should
> also look at the HDHomeRun, it doesn't have an NTSC tuner and it
> is a little pricier, but it has two 8-VSB/QAM-64/QAM-256 tuners
> built in which can be really handy.
>
> > I also read that HD signals take more CPU effort than standard
> > signals.  My myth system is also my main computer, and it has a
> > Pentium-D, 2.8 GHz and an Nvidia 6200 PCI-E card which does the
> > dual-head between my monitor and the TV.  I hope this will be fast
> > enough to simultaneously (1) record a tv show, (2) watch a recording,
> > and (3) work on emacs or browse the web.
> You should just make it, I had a P4 2.8Ghz with MythTV for a
> good long time. I did have to compile with:
>  "--compile-type=release --enable-proc-opt"
> Also, I needed to enable HyperThreading and use a preempt kernel
> with a jiffies of 1000, rather than the default of 100. This
> did not allow me to do much time stretching, but I could watch
> LiveTV at 10% time stretch, LiveTV is the most demanding TV
> watching task on a combined FE/BE system. I could not do
> commercial flagging or transcoding while watching an HD
> program, but HDTV recording is uses very little CPU...
>
> > I can leave the PVR-350 in if that can help the other card in encoding
> > or with playback.  I guess if I kept the PVR-350 in, we could even
> > record two shows at once, one high def and one standard, if the CPU
> > could keep up.
> Yep. It is only the decoding of the HD which is CPU intensive,
> neither PVR-250 nor HDTV recording is CPU intensive and you can
> record one of each while watching an HD program on a P4 at 2.8Ghz
> with one 5400 rpm hard drive.
>
> > I'm running Ubuntu with the 2.6.17 kernel and Myth
> > 0.20, but I can upgrade the kernel if need be. I only have one free
> > PCI slot and no other slots, but I could remove the PVR-350 if I
> > needed to free up a second slot.
> Both the HD-5500 and HDHomeRun are compatible with the PVR-350.
> You may need to upgrade the kernel, or at least install the
> drivers from the CD for the HD-5500.
>
> -- Daniel
>
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-- 
Jared C. Davis <jared at cs.utexas.edu>
3600 Greystone Drive #604
Austin, TX 78731
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/jared/


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