[mythtv-users] 138" diagonal -- now I really need HD!!

Rob Greene robgreene at gmail.com
Sun Sep 21 16:48:19 UTC 2008


We've been finishing off our basement for ... it seems like forever.
A few weeks ago, the theater became functional (11.5' diagonal).  We
are using a PS3 as the Blu-Ray player and now as a UPnP player from
the MythTV backend.

My current capture cards are a Hauppauge PVR 250 and 350.  I have no
MythTV frontend and don't really plan on building one.  I am using the
PS3 in the theater, hoping to use Windows Media Center from the PCs,
and Hauppauge MediaMVP's for our older TVs, and that covers everything
I currently have.

Once I got the Myth backend functioning and assigned a static IP
address (which is apparantly the key to UPnP), the UPnP server "just
worked" for the PS3.  I'll need to play with it a bit, but I was
pretty happy about that.  And amazingly, the SDTV looked passable on
the large screen.  Fuzzy yes, but better than I expected.

*Obviously* I now need HD.  I have some questions and I'm just not
finding answers when I Google... that pesky get the right word combo
thing, I'm sure.  :-)

1) My hardware is an older Compaq W6000.  Dual Xeon, 1.6GHz (IIRC)
with 512MB ram and somewhere around 480GB set aside for Myth.  (I had
another 200GB drive but it just died unfortunately.)  Is this capable
of handling HD?  I know that HD is a lot more info, but I don't think
the machine is really impacted except for when it transcodes or
commercial flags video.  Haven't a clue with HD.  And, approximately
what per hour for disk usage??   (For SDTV it is somewhere around
2.2GB per hour as I recall.)

2) What HD capture card to get?  I like the idea of the dual tuner
card -- and this one at $139 sounds good
(http://www.digitalconnection.com/products/video/fusion7dex.asp) as
well as sounds like it will work under Linux and Myth.  I think I'll
be pulling from cable HD (QAM, I assume).  I'd try antenna but one of
the reasons we have cable is that we only got 1 broadcast TV station
clearly.  PCI ok for the card?  From what I could see, I'm not certain
that the PCIe cards are supported that well (not to mention the
current machine doesn't have it).

3) If I ended up using a couple of HD cards and one does terrestrial
antenna and the other does cable TV, do I have that option in Myth?  I
was a little surprised that it appears to be a only one choice type of
option in the general settings and did not appear to be tied to my
cards.  (I will also state that I've only got one card in my server at
this time, so hopefully I am flat-out wrong!)

Oh yeah, I am using MythDora and so far, I'm happy with the distro approach.

Thanks for any info!
-Rob


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