[mythtv-users] Sell mythtv "set-top" boxes

[Scott Blomfield]

Ben Bucksch Wrote:

<cut>
What would have helped me terribly already would have been an advice for

a good and well-supported tuner card. I see other people are having 
massive problems with tvout as well, so add gfx card in the 
recommondations. The prices don't vary much there, neither does the 
intended use have much influence, only the country, so that could be of 
good use.
</cut>

 As someone who has been looking at this for a long time, but has never
actually bought any hardware, a list of working TV Tuner cards, TV-Out
cards, and Motherboard/Processor combinations would prove invaluable to
99% of newbies. The
"I-cant-buy-a-[tuner|videocard|motherboard|cpu]-till-I-know-it-works"
feeling is especially nauseating. Searching for the answers sometimes
seems rather futile... I know that I personally have spent hours trying
to search with google to find out whether a particular tuner card was
supported under V4L2. I never could find the answer...

 Answers to these questions from the list are usually prompt and
courteous, but the question gets asked at least three times a week.
"What is the best  tuner card?", "Will an All-In-Wonder work as a
tuner?", "Will a CPU1000 7.2Ghz be enough to encode 34 MPEG streams at
1600x1200?" ...

So I was thinking of something like the following...

A place to maintain a list of TV tuner cards:
Stereo/mono, linux driver, common problems, common solutions, whether
you can use more than 1 in a machine, hardware MPEG encoding/decoding,
expected retail cost (and date cost was entered)

A place to maintain a list of graphics cards:
AGP/PCI, tv out?, quality of said tv-out, linux driver, resolution
supported, cost

A place to maintain a list of CPU/Motherboard combinations:
On board sound, On board video, ram speed, cpu model + speed, # of MPEG
streams (at constant resolution) via software encoding, pci slots, agp
slots


Of course, the biggest problem with a list like this is maintenance... a
few months ago the PVR-250/350 wasn't supported on linux, now it is. Who
on earth would/could keep track of all this information?
 
I can volunteer to set up a database on my website to display this
information. Not very quickly, but given some time, I could do it in
PHP. I have no explicit knowledge of the information to fill, however.
Perhaps a few weeks of open season would allow people to input the
information to begin, and after that, close off input? I'm sure that we
could relegate the ability to update the database to a few people.

If anyone thinks this is a good idea, please let me know what sort of
information should be harvested about each device, and we can kick the
idea around a bit more.

Thanks,

Scott