[mythtv-users] Which HD card?

[Brad Templeton]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 01:10:41PM -0700, stan wrote:
> I'm running Myth .19 under Fedora FC4 on an 800 MHz P4 box with an Hauppauge
> PVR350.  Everything has been working great.
> 
> The TV is SDTV, but I'm looking to add an HD capture card with goals of
> 
> 	1.  Having it for the future when I get the new HDTV
> 	2.  Use it now by viewing on my computer LCD monitor


Unfortunately, your 800mhz P4 doesn't have the power to display HDTV.
Perhaps it can do so with XVMC, but I have not heard of people doing
it with such a slow processor.   

Even commercial flagging or transcoding of HDTV would be a major
chore on such a processor, and you would have to transcode and downsample
to have a hope of playing it.

You could however record and play the SDTV shows broadcast on digital
TV.  You may find them superior to analog capture, but not always.

> 1.  Do both of these cards have hardware encoding of HD?
Nobody (under thousands of dollars) does hardware encoding of HD.

> 2.  Do they both output mpeg2 files?

They just receive streamed data off the air.  That data is normally
mpeg-2 TS data, but it's really just bits to the card.

> 3.  Do they also record 5.1 sound if it's sent in the ATSC signal?  Will 5.1
> sound be in the recorded file and available if a player can play it.  Does
> anyone send 5.1 in an ATSC signal?

    They just record the stream off the air.  Sometimes these streams have
    that signal, and while the cards don't "record" the streams, Myth
    does.

> 4.  Can both cards be used as a second NTSC tuner (along with my PVR350)?
    
    Some cards can in analog mode.  Most people don't bother.

> 7.  Are there any quality differences in the captured media (resolution, bit
> rate, etc.)?
    The media are not "captured."  Digital TV is already pre-encoded
    and compressed.   Think of it more like a download (with noise) than
    a capture.

    There are 3 common forms of Digital TV broadcast.   480i, 720p and
    1080i.

> 9.  Does either card implement the "broadcast flag"?
    We killed it, for now.