[mythtv-users] WinFast TV2000 XP Expert with MythTV

[Brian Wood]

On May 5, 2006, at 11:40 AM, Phill Wiggin wrote:

> John Welch wrote:
>
>
> I used one of these for 6-8 months as a primary, and afterwards a
> backup, tuner in my standalone BE.  I had no problems running it  
> with a
> 2500+ w/ 512M of RAM.  But, the video you end up with is, MPEG4, IIRC.
> It didn't make for putting shows on DVD, and I was annoyed by the
> compression artifacts.  I bought a PVR-250 and relegated the WinFast
> TV2k to second-tuner duty and it worked out well, but the 250 had  
> better
> recorded quality (albeit larger file-size).  Then, I replaced it  
> with a
> second PVR-250 and ended up (permanently) loaning it to a friend so he
> could get a mythbox started for 'free'.
>
> In short, if you only need a backup tuner, and aren't worried about
> archiving the shows it records, it's a fine free method.  But, if you
> want to archive and/or have good quality, go with a hardware  
> encoder card.

With a frame-grabber card you can get MPEG-4 or RTJPEG compression,  
and you can adjust the parameters of the compression to get the best  
combination of CPU usage and quality for your particular machine.

If you want to make a DVD you can transcode the result to MPEG-2, but  
the result might not be as good as if you had compressed to MPEG-2 in  
the first place.