[mythtv-users] Recommendations for a new tuner card on a low-spec machine

[Brett Kosinski]

>
> I was trying to use a Lifeview FlyVideo 3000 framegrabber that has an
> SAA7134 chip, but the performance is unacceptable. Accordingly, I am in the
> market for a new tuner card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding. A friend of mine
> has recommended the widely-used Hauppage PVR-150, and the MythTV
> documentation suggests that this will take a significant load off of my
> processor. I have also been eyeing the PVR-500, as watching and recording at
> the same time might be useful.
>

A good choice.  Anything with an onboard MPEG2 decoder will do the job.
With my PVR-150, recording takes very little CPU time, as it's just a matter
of reading from the card and dumping to the disk.

1.       Is there some way to configure MythTV to simply display live TV
> without recording it (or to launch a tvtime-like application from within the
> MythTV interface)? This way I could use the framegrabber I already have for
> the sole purpose of viewing live TV, and use a PVR-150 for recording.
>

Nope, other than hacks luck running an external program video MythVideo or
something.  It's just not the way myth was designed to work.

2.       If that won't work, and I get a PVR-500 (which is a little
> expensive for me), would my hardware be able to keep up with two MPEG-2
> streams?
>

Probably.  The real question is one of I/O bottlenecks.  On my setup, at one
point I was forced to use UDMA2 (only had 40-pin cables), and having two
recordings going while playing a third and doing a commercial flag run would
sometimes result in I/O starvation.  But even then, it was rather
infrequent.  Just make sure you minimize the number of commercial flagging
jobs that can run at once, or disable automatic commercial flagging (it's a
CPU-intensive process).

3.       Does anyone else have any experience with low-end boxes like this?
> Is it a worthwhile endeavor, or is there a high likelihood I'll be
> disappointed with the picture quality, performance, etc. (480x480 or so
> would be nice, maybe even a little higher).
>

Well, the bigger question is one of video playback.  You'll almost certainly
need a video card which supports XvMC, which hardware accelerates MPEG2
decoding, as well.  At that point, I/O really is your biggest potential
bottleneck.

> 4.       I'm trying not to hoard a lot of old TV shows, but if I find
> myself wanting to move MythTV recordings to another computer for archival
> (one that is NOT running MythTV – I have a Windows machine with two 500 GB
> drives), will I be able to easily?
>

And still have them available in Myth?  Unless you're using the storage
groups patch, that might be tough.  If you're not interested in that, then
the videos will play back just fine on Linux or Windows as-is using mplayer
or vlc (or anything else that supports .nuv).

5.       I've heard rumors that new PVR-150s have a different chip that will
> not work under Linux. Anyone know anything about this?
>

Not that I've heard of (though, in the past, some retailers have sent a
different board, even though they ordered the PVR-150).  Newer PVR-500s are
problematic, though (the Samsung chip appears to be rather finnicky).

Brett.
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