[mythtv] Ray - Questions about your setup

[Scott and Jill Gargash]

> I was planning on buying some kind of mjpeg hardware
> card (most likely iomega buz) to do video input and
> hardware compression, assuming that my PC is too wimpy
> to compress and decompress in software.

I also have a too slow computer, but I was thinking about approaching it
from a different angle.  
Why not use a very simple (computationally speaking) video codec for
live TV viewing. Sure it would take a lot of disk space, but disk space
is cheap.  And when the machine is doing nothing (which is most of the
time) transcode into a more space efficient compression format for
archiving purposes.  I've heard reports of P400s being able to do
realtime DVD encoding, so a full up MPEG2 at NTSC resolutions should be
achievable.  And since the transcoding does not have to be real-time, it
can also perform high quality deinterlacing, noise reduction, commercial
elimination, whatever. 

Since it will be transcoding, the original encoding wants to be as high
a quality as possible, ideally lossless. What are computationally simple
video codecs with high video quality, and what IO requirements do they
have?  And what's involved in adding a new codec and transcoding
capabilities to myth?

	Scott