[mythtv-users] Question about Air2PC HDTV capture

[Matthew Schroeder]

Hello all, as they say on the radio: First time poster, long time reader. 

I am in the process of setting up my first mythbox.  Here are the relevant
specs:

Intel Motherboard with NO AGP or PCI-E slots 
2.2Ghz Pentium4 Northwood
1024MB PC2700 SDRAM 
(2) 80GB PATA133 HDD, each on its own IDE channel
Air2PC rev 0.2 "ebay special" ATSC card 

Video card: still gathering information, leaning toward the Nvidia FX5200
PCI video card (fanless) 

I've been able to test the Air2PC ATSC card under windows with the
included software (just got it last nite), and it works fine for SD
content.  I get black screens when I try to view a HDTV stream, but since
I'm still using the onboard video, this is most assuredly the culprit.  I
will attempt a basic myth install tonite after I try to get the drivers
installed in Linux.  Had a question in the meantime.

Currently I am not interested in viewing HDTV at its native resolution. 
Plus the up front costs are still a bit too steep for me, at least to view
LiveTV.  

I'm working with a two system setup, both machines have identical specs on
the motherboard, CPU and RAM.  The frontend will eventually have a PCI
FX5200 video card (no AGP available on these boards).

I was wondering if it was possible for the linux drivers to capture/record
the HDTV content for transcoding purposes, even if the capturing machine
would be incapable of actually playing these HDTV files on its own?  I
would think with a frontend/backend system, for strict ATSC capturing the
backend shouldn't need much horsepower to actually save the stream, since
it will not actually view the content.  Feel free to correct me on this. 

I'm looking for something that looks reasonable on a regular 27" analogue
CRT television (S-Video) after some modest transcoding to smaller
resolution H.264, Xvid, or MPEG2 for later viewing.  My local PBS station
has both HDTV and SD subchannels broadcasting, but they do not always
simulcast the same content.  Sometimes I want to pull a program from the
HDTV stream, other times the SD.  

Does anybody out there have experience with this (or any other) type of
ATSC card that allows the capture of HDTV streams, especially if the
capturing machine cannot *view* the streams natively?  

A better question: Is there any way to just scale down the resolution on
the fly so that HDTV streams could be viewed (albeit only at 640x480
S-Video resolution) using the Live TV feature?

I'd like the SD channels available for LiveTV capability, but I still want
the HDTV channels available to record, even if I cannot view them live. 
So far the documentation I've found on this is a bit fuzzy on how to
accomplish this.  

Thanks in advance for any comments. 



       
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