[mythtv-users] Capture Card... Suggestions?

[Justin Hart]

That all makes quite a bit of sense.  It's a GeForce3 Ti500, so it
should hold its own for this sort of stuff :-)

Thanks for the help!

Justin


On Sun, 5 Sep 2004 16:44:44 -0400, Dave Bush <hockeystatman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'd like to be able to record and watch live tv with pausing and
> > rewind and all that goodness.  I've never built a MythTV box before,
> > so I'm wondering what capture card will give me the most bang for my
> > buck and if I'll need more drive space.  Also wondering if I'll need
> > multiple capture cards to do the job.
> 
> I guess I'll answer your questions with more questions. :)
> 
> Do you plan on watching TV on your monitor, or on an actual TV? You
> didn't mention your video card, so if it doesn't have TV out -AND- you
> plan on watching TV on a TV screen instead of your monitor you should
> plan on getting a video card that supports TV out.
> 
> As for a capture card - I sprung for a PVR-350 card and hindsight
> being 20/20 - I wish I'd saved money and gone with a PVR-250. Don't
> get me wrong - fantastic card, but from what I've heard the TV out
> portion of the PVR-350 is a little clunky. With the TV out on my
> system (A Shuttle SS40G with an SIS chipset) it works like a charm, so
> I've never even tried TV out on my PVR-350.
> 
> Hard drive space is really a matter of taste. How much to you plan on
> recording? (...and once you do you'll find that'll jump right up
> because it's sooooooo convenient!) How much space do you have free
> now? Do you plan on archiving much? FWIW I had an 80 GB drive in my
> system before I put Myth on it, and when I decided to make the Myth
> plunge I upgraded to a 200 GB drive.
> 
> There can be a lot of messing around with profiles to tweak things to
> your taste and if you like super high quality video that 80 will fill
> up fairly quickly. Frankly I've been looking at low-quality mode on my
> Tivo for so long that a comparable mode in Myth is as good or better.
> (I'm using about 1 GB per hour of recorded shows, give or take a bit.)
> 
> I think your system (other than maybe the hard drive) will be plenty
> for a Myth box - especially if you put in a PVR-x50 card. FWIW I
> started running Myth on a similar box, but an Athlon 2600 and just a
> lowly WinTV Go card (ie: no hardware encode/decode) and it worked
> fine. The system I'm running Myth on now is an Athlon 2200. Watching
> videos with no hardware decoding while it records videos through the
> PVR-350 gives me about 37% CPU utilization.
> 
> I'm rambling, but hopefully this makes sense. ;)
> 
> Regards,
> - Dave
> --
> Dave Bush <hockeystatman at gmail.com>
> 
> There are two seasons in my world - Hockey and Construction
> 



-- 
Justin W. Hart