[mythtv-users] HD Homerun questions

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Mon Jan 12 16:12:20 UTC 2009


On Monday 12 January 2009 08:42:17 Mark Knecht wrote:
> I was thinking about getting one to start playing with. I know little
> about HD so far but I figured this could be a way to start learning. A
> couple of questions:
>
> 1) Does the HD Homerun actually handle 1080p or are you limited to 1080i?

It only receives ATSC and QAM, it's unlikely you will find much 1080p material 
transmitted in that format.

>
> 2) How much backend CPU power is required to use this device? My
> server is underpowered on the CPU side but does close to 60GB/S on the
> hard drives. Will this be OK?

No power is needed to encode the signal, since ATSC and QAM are both already 
encoded streams and need only to be written to disk. 60GB/sec. should be more 
than adequate. The CPU (or GPU these days) power is needed to decode and play 
the stream.

>
>    I need to do some thinking about my frontend devices. Currently I
> use a couple of underpowered Pundit-R boxes for our regular TVs but a
> lot of our watching gets done on PC screens. Will I need to do a lot
> of transcoding? One TV is 480p capable and is near the server. Could
> the server become a front end and play 480p directly? What sort of
> video card would be required for component output? Is there one? The
> other is an old Sony SDTV. What do I do there? Any ideas are welcomed.

You can certainly have a single machine run a backend and a frontend. This is 
probably one of the most-used configurations. Component out video cards are 
not common, but any card that is supported by the underlying Linux system 
should be OK. You may want one capable of XvMC if your CPU is marginal.

Did you maybe mean "composite" and not "component"? It's unfortunate those two 
terms are so similar.

-- 
beww
beww at beww.org


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