[mythtv-users] PCI-E Analog Card

[Mark]

Brent Norris wrote:
>
> Yeah we aren't being cheap about it.  We have several hard drive 
> systems.  The box itself is a brand new dell server with onboard RAID. 
> We also have two other servers that will most likely be storage 
> backends.  It will be unlikely that there will be 10 streams going on 
> at any one time, but we are building big to cover the chance.  Plus we 
> have a company called Vbrick that is wanting to sell us a 10 channel 
> system for a lot of money, so I am specing a system of equal 
> capacity.  Their encoders don't change channels or anything so you 
> have to have tuners in front of them, and for that reason alone I am 
> more interested in mythtv to run it.
>
> I can use an old server that has PCI slots, but this new deal server 
> is the one that was purchased for this project, so I would like to 
> work with it if I can.
>
> Brent
>
As Brian stated, I *seriously* doubt you can do this with USB tuners,  
and that many streams without hardware compression will bring the most 
potent server to it's knees,
so if you have to use that Dell server, and if you have at least one PCI 
slot, I'd seriously recommend looking at a PCI expansion chassis.  They 
can be had off Ebay for reasonable
money used, like 300 or less.  Look for Magma, Avid, SBS, and others.  I 
have one of those on my backend, with two PVR250's in it, and it works 
just fine.  You can get up to 13 slot
versions, but that might be a bit much PCI throughput.  I think I paid 
about $150 for my chassis, and another $125 for the host card and 
cable.  I'd be looking hard at your cable service,
and seeing if you can get digital channels too.  That would simplify 
things I think.  It's a lot easier to dump streams to the hard disk than 
to compress them in CPU cycles and then save them.
Make SURE your I/O is up to snuff.  A fast disk controller and disks 
would be a big help.  If you don't have PCI slots at all, I'm told that 
Magma at least has a PCI-e host card that can talk
to it's PCI expansion chassis line, you'll probably pay some mucho coin 
for it though.  You'll probably find it's cheaper to go with older 
hardware and PCI capture cards I think though...

Good luck
Mark