[mythtv-users] Advice on adding second capture card

[Nick]

On 17/01/06, Paul Barker <myth at sixtimesnine.net> wrote:
> Hi All
>
> Well my myth setup has been working great for over a year now so I thought
> it's about time I broke it! I'd like to add a second capture card to the
> system. Currently here's what I have:
>
> Athlon XP 2000
> 512Mb Ram
> 1 X 160Gb Seagate Baracuda 7200RPM 2Mb cache dedicated capture / buffer
> device.
> Fedora 3 (going to 4 when 5 releases)
> PVR-250 capturing over SVID from SKY reciever
>
> I'd like to add a DVB-T card to the above, so I need advice on a few items:
>
> 1) Card recommendations. Something that will work well with the 250 and is
> reliable.

I use both Hauppauge Nova-T and V-Stream DVB Xpert cards with PVR-x50
cards with no problems (once you've got dvb and ivtv working together)

> 2) Disk bandwith. Can I get away with one drive if I wanted to record 2
> programs and watch a recorded show at the same time ? (This would be
> pretty unusual but ...)

I've got a Celeron 2.4 MBE and can easily manage this, even on a
Celeron 1.3 SBE. Disk usage for UK DVB/PVR recordings is not high
(~1MiB/s per recording). When HD arrives this will change though.

> 3) Good general resources for DVB under Linux since I know pretty much
> nothing about DVB.

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/mythdvb.html
http://mythtv.info/

(and wikipedia and Google)

>
> I have another spare Baracuda so I could stripe the capture device but I'm
> trying to have the minimum number of drives in the server to keep heat /
> power consumption down.

No need to IME. You may want to create an LVM though so you can expand
your recording capacity as and when necessary.

Nick