[mythtv] [mythtv-users] question

[Brad Templeton]

Many of these can be found in the archives and wikis but...
On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 08:53:12PM -0600, Byron Williams wrote:
> 1)Can Mythtv go higher than 125?  

Mythtv doesn't go to anything.  Well perhaps it goes to 11.
Various tuner/capture cards tune various sources.  Most popular tuner
cards will tune all the Cable and OTA NTSC channels.    No QAM tuner card
is available yet for the rare unencrypted digital cable.
> 
> 2.)Do you have to have the cable box / satelite reciever  set up, turned on
> and tuned to that channel that you wish to record, like a timed VCR or not? 

It is much better to use analog cable, but if you must, then you want
a way to control your cable box etc.  An IR Blaster can do that but there
are always minor issues.   Some rare boxes can be controlled with serial.
Many such boxes let you put in timer events to tune them, that is more
reliable (but may not change if a program moves timeslot.)  Analog tuning
is pretty much 100% reliable, and you can often use it on the analog channels
on some digi-cable systems which really give you both analog and digital.
> 
> 3) I  seem to be confused as to which operating system is preferred to be
> used.  I think I saw Debian but it was unstable?  I don't know linux yet,
> but I am willing to give it a try to make this all work.  

Debian is Linux, as is Fedora and most of the others you see people
running MythTV under.   Debian is quite stable, but the latest releases
of packages on it are marked "unstable" to let people know they were warned
about running the latest packages.

Unfortunately, bleeding edge stuff like PVRs tends to need the latest
packages.  The ones in debian/unstable are pretty similar to the ones
in Fedora Core 3 or other releases.

My advice is to pick a distribution of linux that has a lot of people
running MythTV and precompiled binaries.   That's either Fedora or Debian.   

Debian used to have a hard install, but the story goes the new installer
is quite nice.  There are many debian derived packages which include
a nice installer.  Knoppmyth has Mythtv already on it, though I didn't
like how it configured Debian for my own tastes -- yours may vary.

> 
> 3b)Is there an updated requirements page?  Shopping list?? I am willing to
> spend some (not a ton) money to get the proper(prefered-by most ) video card
> (and min processor, memory, HD) for the mythtv to work.  It seems like it
> would be just as expensive or cheaper than paying for tivo to build one
> myself.
> 
> All responses are greatly appreciated.

Well, there are largely 3 types of MythTV hardware goals:

    a) Re-use aging hardware which is lying around and thus free.

	A good path, you can get by for regulary TV with a WINTV-250
	(soon the cheaper 150 will work). 

	Hunt a cheap card with tv-out (if TV out is what you want)
	such as a geforce4 mx, which can be found online for $35 -- use
	froogle.com

    b) Buy new (cheap) hardware for regular TV

	Folks here tend to like cool new small form factor PCs like
        Shuttle XPC and Asus Pundit.  If you have a modern processor
	(even a cheap Sempron or Celeron D) you could get by with
	a cheap capture card instead of a WINTV-250.

    c) Go all out for HDTV

	At least for now, until xvmc is stable, HDTV is hard work.
        You want a shiny ~3ghz P4 system (High end Celery might work as
	well).   You want a video card able to do HDTV -- I'm using the
	Nvidia FX 5200 right now to mixed results, hard to say if anybody
	is truly happy with HDTV output process.

	You will need a pcHDTV-3000 card, of course.  Or DVB card in
	overseas lands.