[mythtv-users] 138" diagonal -- now I really need HD!!

Jon Bishop jon.the.wise.gdrive at gmail.com
Mon Sep 22 08:49:23 UTC 2008


On Sep 21, 2008, at 9:48 AM, Rob Greene wrote:

> *Obviously* I now need HD.  I have some questions and I'm just not
> finding answers when I Google... that pesky get the right word combo
> thing, I'm sure.  :-)
>
> 1) My hardware is an older Compaq W6000.  Dual Xeon, 1.6GHz (IIRC)
> with 512MB ram and somewhere around 480GB set aside for Myth.  (I had
> another 200GB drive but it just died unfortunately.)  Is this capable
> of handling HD?  I know that HD is a lot more info, but I don't think
> the machine is really impacted except for when it transcodes or
> commercial flags video.  Haven't a clue with HD.  And, approximately
> what per hour for disk usage??   (For SDTV it is somewhere around
> 2.2GB per hour as I recall.)

You are going to need more space. That was my experience moving to HD.  
It *may* take a tiny bit longer to flag commercials, and EONS longer  
to transcode (unless you transcode to much smaller files). Other than  
that, no problems. The backend really just streams the data to the  
frontend (or uPNP device) which is where all the decoding gets done.  
The PS3 should have plenty of power for that task. File sizes become  
difficult to predict. My PBS Nova episodes are usually about 3gb per  
hour, wheras my NBC late night episodes usually run about 7gb per  
hour. It really depends on the video source though.

> 2) What HD capture card to get?  I like the idea of the dual tuner
> card -- and this one at $139 sounds good
> (http://www.digitalconnection.com/products/video/fusion7dex.asp) as
> well as sounds like it will work under Linux and Myth.  I think I'll
> be pulling from cable HD (QAM, I assume).  I'd try antenna but one of
> the reasons we have cable is that we only got 1 broadcast TV station
> clearly.  PCI ok for the card?  From what I could see, I'm not certain
> that the PCIe cards are supported that well (not to mention the
> current machine doesn't have it).

I have a pair of Pinnacle HDTV PCI cards in my backend. They work  
great, but I did have to move to a newer kernel than was available for  
my distro (suse 10.3 - currently released is 2.6.22, but I had to  
compile 2.6.24 to get the pinnacle cards to work). Also, channels that  
were fuzzy in SD come in crystal clear in HD on the same antenna,  
though lately I've had some issues with NBC (ch 3.1) coming in a bit  
artifacted - but this channel was literally SNOWY in SD, and only  
comes in bad late at night (which I can't figure out - I thought HEAT  
degraded signal strength)

> 3) If I ended up using a couple of HD cards and one does terrestrial
> antenna and the other does cable TV, do I have that option in Myth?  I
> was a little surprised that it appears to be a only one choice type of
> option in the general settings and did not appear to be tied to my
> cards.  (I will also state that I've only got one card in my server at
> this time, so hopefully I am flat-out wrong!)

Yes. You will have to set up a lineup for each source, and associate  
each card with the appropriate lineup. Myth offers no limit to the  
number of sources you can add. At least, none that I've encountered  
(I've only used 3 though, an SD lineup,an ATSC HD lineup, and a  
DirecTV Satellite lineup)

~Jon


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