[mythtv-users] TV out for unlisted card?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Mon Apr 2 02:21:08 UTC 2007


On Apr 1, 2007, at 7:45 PM, Angus wrote:

>>
>     How would I know if my card is "non-hardware"? And of all the  
> cards
> I looked at, I don't remember seeing XvMC as part of their advertised
> specs. Is it not a popular standard?
>     Well, looking at my capture card (KWorld Global Terminator) it  
> says
> it supports MPEG-4/2/1 but then also says (note: codec need(sic) to be
> downloaded from internet). What does that mean?
>

Any simple frame-grabber card "supports" MPEG 4/2/1 or any other  
codec like VC-1, H264, DiVX or whatever,  in that the actual encoding  
is done with software.

Those "specs" are written by marketing people, not engineers.

The best way I have found to know what you have is the price point,  
if it seems really cheap it's almost always of "you get what you pay  
for".

Software encoding can be OK if you have the CPU cycles available.  
It's actually more flexible in that you can use any codec for which  
software is available on your platform. Cards using hardware encoding  
are limited to whatever codec are hard-wired into the encoder chip.

If you don't have a lot of CPU the Hauppauge PVR series cards are  
hard to beat, well-supported and they do a nice job. They have a  
strange coding on their products, a blue box means software encoding  
and an orange one means it does H/W encoding, this being for retail  
packaging of course.


Brian Wood
beww at beww.org





More information about the mythtv-users mailing list