[mythtv-users] HDTV, Myth, HD-2000, HD-3000, questions galore (and hopefully answers from the smart people... )

[Kyle Rose]

> Hardware:
> -- Do the HD-2000 work better, or are better supported than the
> HD-3000 cards?

I find the 3000 cards work much, much better in my setup than the 2000
cards.  The 2000 cards appear to have too small a hardware FIFO, so in
some machines they may not be able to get access to the PCI bus
quickly enough to avoid FIFO overruns.

> -- Which cards only work for DVB? Which only for OTA?

So far, the HD-2000/3000 only do OTA.  Supposedly they'll soon do
*unencrypted* QAM-encoded digital cable.

> -- How much CPU power is required to playback 1080i or 720p streams?

My 3.2G P4 with HT uses about 44% of "both" CPU's playing back the
most CPU-intensive streams.  You can probably figure it out from
there.

> OS:
> -- What Kernel, IVTV/V4L/  are recommended for:
>     -- HD-2000
>     -- HD-3000

I use 2.6.9 with pcHDTV-1.6 (patched to extend the software buffer for
the HD-2000) and ivtv-0.2.0-rc3b.  No v4l patch.  Everything works
very smoothly now.

Cheers,
Kyle