[mythtv-users] Question about BT8x8 digital TV cards

[Hamish Moffatt]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 06:22:14PM +1100, Phill Edwards wrote:
> I'm in Australia and thinking of going digital. I have 2 BT8x8
> analogue cards now which works well. I was going to replace one of
> these with a digital  BT8x8 card (something like a VisionPlus which
> people have reported as easy to get working and good quality). Before
> I do this I have some questions:
> 
> 1) Is it OK to have 1 analogue card + 1 digital card in the same backend? 

Should be fine.

> 2) Do digital BT8x8 cards chew up CPU? I know the analogue ones do,
> but I thought that the digital cards just wrote the incoming MPEG2
> stream straight to disk which would mean very little CPU required. Am
> I right or delusional?

You're right. The data just gets streamed to disk, via the CPU.

> 3) Will playback of MPEG2 require more CPU than playback of my
> existing MPEG4 recordings?

Don't know.

> 4) Will there be issues writing digital MPEG2 + analogue MPEG4
> recordings to disk simultaneously? I saw a thread about overloading
> the PCI bus or something.

Possibly. The analog card is streaming uncompressed video and audio so
your PCI bus will have quite a bit of other activity, which the
BT878-based digital cards aren't provisioned for. I'd advise you to get
a newer card, which are available for about the same price.


Hamish
-- 
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish at debian.org> <hamish at cloud.net.au>