[mythtv-users] Tuner cards that do HD?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Mon Apr 16 10:26:18 UTC 2007


On Apr 16, 2007, at 2:35 AM, Alex Malinovich wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 02:04 -0400, Mark Bobak wrote:
>> Rather than a tuner card, you might want to try an HDHomeRun.
>> http://www.silicondust.com/
>>
>> It's a standalone box, with two tuners and a network port.  It's  
>> fully
>> supported by Myth (as long as you use the 0.20-fixes branch).  Each
>> tuner supports OTA or cable tuning.  But, note that for cable tuning,
>> it will only tune unencrypted channels, which is going to be true for
>> any solution you come up with.
>>
>> The nice thing is, because they're a standalone device, you avoid the
>> whole kernel driver issue that you need to deal with when you're
>> running a tuner card.  I'm running two of them on my new Myth setup,
>> for a total of 4 tuners, strictly doing OTA in my case, and I'm happy
>> with them.
>
> Wow, looks like I'm behind the times here. So just to make sure I'm  
> not
> missing anything here:
>
> 1) I pay $169 to get the HDHomeRun
> 2) I plug in two coax cables and a network cord
> 3) I (somehow?) tell MythTV to use it
> 4) I watch TV?
>
> Is it actually that easy? This looks like an awesome solution, I just
> want to make sure I'm not missing any important details before I dish
> out the $169. :)

The "important detail" you might be missing is the fact that the HDHR  
can't receive analog transmissions, only ATSC and unencrypted QAM.

Not that it isn't a great device IMHO, but I think your original post  
mentioned analog.

Some cards (like the HD-3000) can receive digital and analog signals,  
though their performance as analog receivers is limited to that of a  
simple frame-grabber which means that your CPU will have to do the  
encoding. This may or may not be a problem for you.

Personally I'd use a hardware-encoding card for analog like the PVRs.

Although you can get a single card to do both jobs it's like anything  
else in life: use the right tool for the right job, or you may not be  
happy with the result.

Brian Wood
beww at beww.org





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