[mythtv-users] many questions from a MythTV newbie

[R. G. Newbury]

Warren wrote:
> Daniel Jarboe wrote:
> 
>>On 3/29/06, R. G. Newbury <newbury at mandamus.org> wrote:
>><snip>
>>  
>>
>>>You must understand that the hd3000 does not go a good job in NTSC mode,
>>>as it has no hardware encode/decode capability. You have to use the box
>>>and software to deal with the signal...The Hauppauge cards, on the other
>>>hand have that built in, and therefor feed the same digital stream as
>>>the HD card does in ATSC to the bus.
>>>Therefore my small/quiet Via SP13000 can record 3 simultaneous programs:
>>>2 in SD from a PV500 and 1 ATSC from the HD3000. Note that this
>>>motherboard does not do full HD... it is limited to 1024x1024 on TV out
>>>(but the internal video to monitor will do 1980x 1080 and uses Xvmc.
>>>    
>>>
>>
>>Thank you very much for clarifying this, I completely missed it. 
>>Judging by the DViCO marketing bullet: Includes MPEG encoder for
>>analog TV/video recording, I take it FusionHDTV card will be much
>>easier on resources for NTSC, if I want the ability to decode ATSC or
>>NTSC with a single card.
>>
>>Thanks for mentioning that.
>>~ Daniel

> You do realize that to run NTSC and ATSC on the same card you have to 
> unload the drivers, reflash the firmware into the card then load the 
> other set of drivers?  ATSC is captured by DVB drivers, not V4L drives 
> like NTSC.

Well this just amounts to doing a 'modprobe -r one-set' and a 'modprobe 
  other-set'. Although this is 'easy' it is not clear that you can do 
this on a 'live' basis while running something like mythtv.

I suspect not, because this would change the available CaptureCard v 
Channel Lineup pairings. I think that Myth checks for the cards on 
startup and will fail if one of the cards is "not there", as in, there 
is a physical card which is set up for one protocol (ATSC) but no card 
for the NTSC protocol. I am not sure that it would gracefully changeover 
and accept that there is now an NTSC card and no ATSC card.

If you are willing to shutdown the backend and re-start after modprobing 
the drivers, then this might work....

But its a hell of a lot of work for not much benefit... Go buy a 
Hauppauge card (even a 500) for NTSC use and get the benefit of having 
the hardware decode.