[mythtv-users] Hardware and software pre-building advice

[Kyle Rose]

"Rasmus K. Brosbøl" <rkb at femkant.dk> writes:

> I want PIP working, but do not particularily care about radio. So the 
> question is if I should go for one PVR-350 and a 250, or should I 
> choose two 250s instead? Can the mpeg2 decoder on the 350 be used while 
> PIP is turned on, or will it decode using software? What if PIP is not 
> turned on?

These are really questions for ivtv-users: the driver is in a state of
flux, and I know there are some issues with LOTS of OSD (i.e., not
decoder) traffic during decoding, but I don't know if PIP qualifies as
"lots."

Aside: I have a 350 but since I got my HDTV I don't use the video out
anymore so it drops back to 250 functionality.  If you feel you'll
have any interest at all in doing OTA HDTV PVR stuff, you probably
want to get 2 250's instead of the 350 and a good quality video card
with both S-Video (for now) and DVI (for later), along with a pcHDTV
HD-2000 card, which will be available until the federal guv'mint's
rights grab goes into effect mid-next year.

For that matter, you'll need something a lot better than a Athlon XP
2000+ to decode HDTV: I have a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 and even with that I
can't use all the deinterlacing/upconvert filters I'd like to, though
it plays HDTV with standard deinterlacing just fine and decodes and
post-processes DVD's with ease.

If you don't care about HDTV, ignore most of the above. :)

Cheers,
Kyle