No subject

CPU load.......

Cost.......

[Yes, I want to know?]

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Q: Can I connect one or more external USB TV dongles to an USB hub?

[????]

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Q: Where I live, DVB-T uses six "muxes", and up to four channels in each
   mux at the same time. Can I buy six DVB-T TV cards or USB dongles and
   record (or time shift) all TV channels at the same time?

To record more than one channel from the same mux (multiplexer) is
sometimes referenced to as "Multirec". There is a still experimental
(September 2008) feature in MythTV to record all four channels from a
single card at the same time, given that they are using the same
"mux". This new feature affects many parts of MythTV to make this
totally transparent to you as a user. MythTV knows about what channels
are on the same mux and will be clever enough to schedule the hardware
in a way that if you actually have one card for each mux, you can
record all TV channels at the same time.

But not all TV PCI cards or USB TV dongles can do this. See....

[how do I know if what I buy can do this or not? Any "known to just work" cards?]

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Q: In practice, how many cards/channels can I record at the same time on
   one single back-end?

The DVB-T stream is already compressed, so storing it is just about PCI/USB
bandwidth and how fast you can store it on disk. As a rule of thumb....

The same apply to a PCI card with hardware encoding of video content, the
exception being ........ You can expect to be able to .....

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Q: So, any *safe* PC and TV card hardware to buy? A brand?

Sorry, there is no safe route. You can find what other uses at ......
mailing lists......

But note that when some say their MythTV setup "works" it can mean
very different things, like

  - I set it up and it worked when trying it out for 10 minutes

  - Works perfectly, I just have to reboot every second day but who
    cares, I do that anyway

  - My machine freezes when doing analog and digital recording
    at the same time, I just avoid doing that

  - When I get home from vacation at least 8 of 10 recordings
    are not blank

So you have to ask more *specific* questions to find out how well it
works, like "How long have you had this setup?", "Have you done X
recordings in parallel?", "Any hangs?" and so on. Things that matches
your requirements.

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