[mythtv-users] Re: Is there a card that will tune in digital cable tv channels?

[Sean, Sharon and Kyle Harbour]

Thanks for the info, Ray. I had contemplated the IR approach, but
shied away from starting from scratch, plus it sounds messy. The
serial method of controlling a digital cable tuner sounds very
promising, I'll check it out.

Just curious, what kind of performance are you seeing on your
hardware? For testing I have a single P3-750/512MB RAM, 80 GB hard
drive and onboard Intel 810e soundcard with a WinTV GO model 190,
output via an old ATI Mach64 RAGE II+DVD card with composite out and
the GATOS drivers on Mandrake 9.1. Capture and playback at 480x480
RTJPEG is actually pretty good. I have live TV viewing set at
480x240, so I can capture and view at the same time with acceptable
quality, but it won't quite capture and playback a recording
simultaneously at 480x480, I get a skip in the playback every 5
seconds. Also, the built in soundcard seems to introduce an annoying
low level background hiss or slight distortion to all recorded sound.
btaudio doesn't seem to work correctly either on this capture card,
though I did get the chipmonk voice effect without the analog line,
so it might work yet with the correct settings.
I've pretty much reached the limits of a P3-750, so I'm upgrading to
an Athlon 2000+ with an additional capture card this week. If I can
get the sound issues worked out, it should be very satisfactory for
now, especially if it can handle direct MPEG4 conversion.

Thanks,

Sean Harbour

>From: Ray Olszewski <ray at comarre.com>
>Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Is there a card that will tune in
digital cable tv channels?

>There is a bit of information about the IR Blaster approach in the 
MythTV 
>HowTo. If you search the archives of this list, you'll find more 
about both 
>it and the serial-cable method. Because there is not a single, 
standard 
>solution (specifically to the channel-changing question), there is
no 
>"one-stop shopping" answer along the lines of a HowTo or a FAQ.

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