[mythtv-users] Absolute newbie stumped

Tom listmail at athenet.net
Tue May 19 22:48:52 UTC 2009


Hi all, I just joined the list. I run a Suse/Samba box at home and am 
tinkering with another for LAMP purposes. I use CentOs and FC boxes at 
work, and some RHEL ones. I'll apologize in advance for the extremely 
elementary-level questions.

I've been reading the archives at Gossamer and poking all over the web for 
enough info to just get started with MythTV. I've been at this for two 
months. All I know so far is that that I think I want two ATSC tuner cards 
and I'm thinking of starting with MythDora, since I have some passing 
familiarity with FC.

l'll probably begin with one capture card. Comments I've read on 
MythTVtalk.com seem to indicate that dual capture cards are overpriced 
compared to a pair of single cards. Dunno if that's really true.

I need to decide what capture cards I want so I know what bus they plug 
into so I can start looking for a machine or motherboard & cpu combo. 
I  need to record OTA (ATSC). No cable or satellite in the cards for the 
present.

I want to record SD for now, but leave the way open for HD. Playback (for 
now) will be s-video, but there's a HDMI equipped television in my future. 
Not next week, mind you. But some day.

I also know that software decoding is probably not the way to go; getting a 
capture card with hardware to offload that process from my CPU(s) is 
probably smart.

I see here someone using a DViCO FusionHDTV7 Dual Express card. Doesn't 
look like it was painless, but he apparently got it to play. I was told at 
one point, "just get a Hauppage 300" or some such thing, but I can't find 
those for sale new with a warranty. Poking around their site at e.g.
http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/prods_hvr_internal.html
shows me a list of cards and few hints about which if any would play nice 
for MythTV. Most lists of cards that people are using seem to date from 
2005 or earlier, and I don't know who to believe

I go back & forth on the subject of front-end machine in the same box as 
the back-end, or two separate machines.

So could someone point me at a recent list of cards known to perform well 
with Myth, with reasonably low extra hacking effort required?


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