[mythtv-users] Can Mythtv record uncompressed video from PVR-150? (my Comcast solution)

[Nick Rout]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:
> As Comcast moves towards turning off clear-QAM in my area, I've been
> working on resurrecting my PVR-150s for use with the 'free' DTAs.  One
> of the nice things about the SD clear-QAM that Comcast sent was that
> it took about half the disk space for the same length recording that
> the PVR-150 did.  (And to my eye with better overall quality.)  I
> could transcode to a better format, but I wondered if there was a way
> to get the uncompressed stream from the card in order to avoid the
> quality issued which can be introduced by transcoding.   From what I
> have found on the web, it's possible to get the raw audio/video stream
> before encoding is done. on these cards.  The Mythtv page for the
> PVR-500 even mentions it:
>
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_PVR-500
>
> /dev/video0 – The encoding capture device (Read-only)
> /dev/video24 – The raw audio capture device (Read-only)
> /dev/video32 – The raw video capture device (Read-only)
> /dev/radio – The radio tuner device
> /dev/vbi0 – The "vertical blank interval" (Teletext) capture device
>
> So my question is:  Has anyone ever configured MythTV to treat the
> PVR-150 (or similar cards) as a dumb capture card rather as an MPEG
> capture stream?
> If so, what did it take to set it up?

IMHO this is madness, even if it were possible. You will be recording
a file that is many times larger than the PVR150 file would be. You
will NOT simply be recording the unencrypted QAM stream, you will be
recording that stream decoded to analogue and then encoded raw to the
hard drive.