[mythtv-users] Cheap frontend

Mike Perkins mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk
Wed May 15 22:05:01 UTC 2013


On 15/05/13 20:59, Warpme wrote:
> On 5/13/13 10:56 PM, Josu Lazkano wrote:
>> Hello all.
>>
>> I had an Nvidia ION1 board but it does not work now, I want to change it.
>>
>> I want to use as a frontend to watch TV, videos and play music. I need
>> to watch HD films, so I think that it will be good to have a hardware
>> decoding.
>>
>> Which hardware do you recommend? I need a cheap one.
>>
> Well - I'll be probably provocative but why ION1 isn't OK for You ?
> I have 3 of them in 3 rooms and use daily since approx 2y.
> They are playing TV (mainly HD), Blurays (highest I watch was 1080p at 32Mb/s),
> tons of stuff downloaded from Internet (mainly is HD), play music and
> occasionally watch Yutube. All this exclusively on MythtTV.
> I didn't remember SINGLE movie which fails on any of them in those 2y (and I
> think 1000+ of movies were played).
> Also over 150+ Blurays I watched - no single issue with playback nor playback
> was not as expected...
> So what particular content/function is not working for You on ION1 ?
>
I think the answer is this really depends on your source material. In the old 
analog days your tuner encoded the input so what went on your disk - and came 
out your video card - was a known quality.

With digital it will vary according to what your broadcaster(s) provide, as 
digital tuners just pick the program out of the stream and store it on disk as is.

This digital stream will vary not just from country to country (broadcast 
standards) and broadcaster to broadcaster but from program to program, and may 
even change during advert breaks!

It is no surprise to me that the number of problems we have been seeing on this 
list about barely playable programs (or worse) has increased as more of us go 
digital. (There's currently another thread about bad .avi files.)

The fact that one user has a good experience with a certain equipment setup may 
mean little 50 miles or more down the road.

-- 

Mike Perkins



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