[mythtv-users] Two questions (capture card and backend)

[Brian Wood]

On Sep 21, 2006, at 6:24 AM, Aaron Howard wrote:

> 1. I don't know if any of you are fans of http://www.woot.com/ but
> today they are selling a USB tv-tuner called a "Adaptec GameBridge TV
> USB2 Video Capture/TV Tuner" for $19.95 + $5 s/h.  It looks like a
> simple framegrabber but I'm curious if anybody's ever used one and can
> comment on it.  Anyone?

Don't know anything specific but the price alone would tell you that  
you are correct, it is a simple frame grabber, and would thus require  
much CPU to be useful, for the encoding and the USB subsystem.

>
> 2. What are people's thoughts on whether a dual Xeon 3.06Ghz w/ 1GB
> RAM and two or three 36GB Ultra320 SCSI drives would be able to handle
> the backend load with two framegrabber cards, one ATSC-110 capture
> card, and firewire?  It could theoretically be recording two NTSC
> tuners (CPUs doing the encoding), grabbing an ATSC stream and a
> firewire stream, while feeding up to three front ends.  One thing for
> sure is I think the roughly ~100GB from three 36GB drives would fill
> up mighty fast.
>

Your last supposition is quite correct, you would need/want more disk  
space very soon. The CPU horsepower would seem adequate, but I don't  
know how well Myth can take advantage of multiple CPUs (not just Myth  
but everything it needs to run, QT, GL etc.). A single 3Ghz. CPU  
would probably be adequate though.

SCSI drives are nice but not really necessary for a Myth system.

Looks like you are putting too many $$$ into the CPUs and disk  
system, and not enough into the capture devices. I'd go with hardware  
encoding and less on CPU/drives. Folks seem to have better luck with  
the more common, and thus better supported, capture devices.

But if you have that hardware just hanging around doing nothing it  
certainly couldn't hurt to try.