[mythtv-users] Will this setup record HD from over the air?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sun Jul 8 01:15:11 UTC 2007


Owen Mehegan wrote:
> Having recently canceled my overpriced cable TV service, I decided to  
> upgrade my Myth system's jurassic TV Wonder VE tuner card to  
> something a little nicer. There's a lot of HD content available over  
> the air where I live, so I was thinking I'd just start recording that.
> 
> My plan is to get a pcHDTV card and some kind of antenna  
> (suggestions?), and put it in my current Myth system. I have a  
> Celeron 2.13 ghz processor, 1G of RAM, and I'm using two ATA-100  
> drives in a software RAID 1. This was always fine for recording  
> standard definition content off of cable, but will it be fast enough  
> for HD?

The problem is not so much recording HD as it is playing it back.

ATSC, or "over-the-air" HD, is already encoded as MPEG2, so the only
thing you have to be able to do is write the data to the disk.

Playing it back requires decoding the MPEG2 stream. You didn't mention
what video card you are using. Generally "business type" or integrated
graphics can be problematical, but any nVidia-based card from a 5200 on
up, using nVidia's drivers, should have no problem.

XvMC allows transferring a lot of the decoding load to the video card
itself. It can create some problems, most notably with color in the OSD,
but there are some workarounds for that.

Some Unichrome chipsets can also take advantage of GPU acceleration,
generally ATI cards can't, at least not in any supported way.

So the question is: What's your video output setup?

BEWW


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