[mythtv-users] Having Trouble Finding The Right TV Capture Card

[Brian Wood]

On Saturday 19 September 2009 18:49:32 Tom Purl wrote:
> I've been looking at the hardware section of the wiki for an hour now,
> but I'm still having problems.  Any help that anyone can give me would
> be greatly appreciated.
>
> I have been using the PVR-150 with analog cable (in the US) for a
> couple of years now and have been very happy.  However,  I'm going to
> be ditching cable soon and switching to antenna-only TV soon.  I don't
> think that the PVR-150 support ATSC, so I need a new card.
>
> Here are my requirements:
>
> * USB or PCI (NOT PCI-E) interface
> * ATSC tuner
> * Hardware-based encoder
>   * My computer has a 1.8 Ghz Sempron processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a
> 9-year-old Riva TNT2 video card.  I therefore don't believe that I can
> get by with a software-based encoder.
> * Very solid LinuxTV and MythTV support.

As was pointed out, the "encoder" for an ATSC signal is at the TV station or 
network origination point. It's already encoded when you get it.

You will need to decode it to play it, but that's not the job of the capture 
device (though the PVR-350 did have a hardware MPEG decoder, and could in 
fact be used as a video card, it wasn't all that successful, good video cards 
are very cheap and are a far better way to go).

The only reason I pointed this out again is so I can chime in and suggest an 
HDHomerun.

There are PCI and USB devices out there that you could use, but the HDHR has 2 
tuners, needs only an ethernet connection to the backend and can be located 
anywhere on your network (WiFi will work, up to a point, but  hardwore is 
better, but I suppose that would be true of just about any TCP/IP 
application.

If cost is the top consideration, the HDHR may not be the best choice (around 
$160US, but remember you get 2 tuners). It's a really elegant solution.



-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org