[mythtv-users] USA recommendations for Digital Over the Air Capture Card

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Eric Mesa wrote:
> I'm thinking of giving Comcast the old heave-ho.  Most of the TV I have 
> time to watch nowadays is Network Tv.  The only TV shows I watch on 
> Cable are The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and (the wife watches) South 
> Park.  The first two are available on Hulu, so if I can watch them by 
> setting the browser in Myth to Firefox, then I'm fine.  South Park is 
> also available streaming elsewhere.
> 
> So, that taken care of, I was curious what recommendations other USA OTA 
> myth users have.  I've been happy with my Hauppage 500 and I'd like to 
> get something equivalent if it exists.  I've done some research on the 
> MythTV wiki.  It appears, from the way that the wiki is written that the 
> 2250 is the only Hauppage card that has 2 ATSC tuners.  All the other 
> cards appear to have 1 ATSC and 1 NTSC tuner.  I'd really like to be 
> able to record 2 shows at once OTA. 

The pcHDTV (3000, now 5500) is a pretty good card, but, as you 
mentioned, only 1 ATSC turner, and you can't even use the ATSC and NTSC 
tuners at the same time.  For 2 tuners, the HD HomeRun is the device of 
choice.  Its a network device with 2 antenna inputs, 2 ATSC tuners and 
accessed at ethernet speeds.

> Also, I've noticed that it appears that ATSC cards don't have hardware 
> encoding.  Is this because of something inherent in the way that ATSC is 
> transmitted?  Is it already encoded or something like that?  I mean, I 
> think I've read that ATSC is MPEG-2, but I thought cable was as well.  
> So is this something I should watch out for?  My CPU is only a P4 since 
> I've had hardware encoding on the PVR-500.

Yes, ATSC is a transport stream that is already MPEG encoded.  All you 
have to do is extract the correct subchannel from the transport stream 
to watch it.  So recording is little more than writing the stream to 
disk.  You backend doesn't doesn't need all that much horsepower to 
record.  Your frontend will need substantially more depending on the 
display resolution you want to watch at.  But, there are ways around 
that with the proper video card as well.  XvMC support can do when your 
CPU isn't enough on its own.  There are also new APIs coming soon that 
can help as well with newer video hardware.

> Also, it was a real PITA to get the PVR-500 seated in my shuttle-like 
> case.  So if there's one that you guys recommend that has two onboard 
> tuners, but is not as long, that would be AWESOME.  I don't think, if I 
> remember correctly, that the height was an issue with this case, I think 
> it was the length. 

The HD Homerun is an EXTERNAL box which you talk to over ethernet, no 
card length issues there.  Dual recordings can flood a 100Mbps 
etherlink, but you should be able to do better with a Gbps ethernet 
connection (which are becoming more commonplace all the time!).

> One last bit of tidbit for those giving recommendations - I only have 
> one PCI slot and it's PCI 1x - or whatever it is the PVR-500 uses.
> 
> Thank you so much!

I'm still playing with my pcHDTV 5500 on my AMD XP 2600+ backend.  It 
records just fine.  My problem is my frontends, neither have the 
horsepower to do DTV justice just yet....

Good luck!

> -- 
> Eric Mesa
> http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)