[mythtv-users] HDMI capture card with linux drivers

[Yeechang Lee]

Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> says:
> Besides which, I don't see how VDPAU factors into any of this.
> We're talking about difficulty in recording, while VDPAU exists for
> playback only.

On the contrary. What's the point of recording something you can't
play back?

In retrospect today's HD-PVR would have been more or less pointless to
own before sometime in 2007 or 2008, because no existing PC would've
been fast enough to play its high-definition h.264 encodings.[!] Sure,
it could've been used to encode HD into SD video, but Hauppauge and
other vendors already sold a wide range of SD encoders that could do
that.[*] Even in mid-2008, Robert McNamara, John Poet, and other
HD-PVR early adopters reported that, at maximum quality, its output
sometimes stumped even the fastest Core 2 Duo boxes. VDPAU, and its
full support for h.264 hardware-acelerated decoding and rendering,
could not have come along any sooner than it did.

[*] That's my understanding, at least; the HD-PVR is the first
Hauppauge or v4l-using device I've ever used.

[!] To the extent that people on mythtv-users thought in detail about
what a true "HD capture card for MythTV" would look like, we imagined
it would be a) something that produced MPEG-2 output or b) some sort
of Linux-compatible CableCARD adapter.

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