[mythtv-users] Hardware for Over the Air Digital

[Craig Treleaven]

At 2:37 PM -0600 10/15/09, LuKreme wrote:
>I do not have satellite, cable, or an antenna right now. All my video comes straight off my broadband cable.
>
>All that I want to 'record' is the over-the-air HDTV broadcasts (ATSC? what's that stand for?). While I currently only care about a maximum of two feeds, it might be nice during something like the Olympics to have more recording capability, so something I could expand to four feeds might be worth looking into.
>
>I'm hesitant about the HDHomeRun simply because I don't want another box, but if that's clearly the best choice I am willing to reconsider. On the other hand, I guess with the HDHomeRun I could simply dump the streams to the server in the first place, so that is an option.
>
>Oh, and I also am going to want to reencode the MPEG-2 streams to h.264 (720p), though I expect to do that on the MacPro since it's a much faster machine. However, if anyone has any suggestions along those lines, I'm all ears.
>
>(My projector cannot do 1080p, so I see no point in keeping around large MPEG2 1080 files just to take up space).

The HDHomerun is a good choice.  Wherever you have a source cable (coax from the  antenna, right?) and a network drop (and power).  For quite a while, I had mine with my networking gear since my antenna and cableco feeds are patched to the rest of the house from there, as well.  More recently, I've moved the HDHR to the entertainment equipment stack since I'm now using the IR receiver to control Myth.  The box is small and silent.  For us Mac users, a major plus is that it is supported under OS X either with Myth or EyeTV.  Yes, the backend runs under OS X--it is extremely rare for it to miss a recording and the backend has crashed only once in two years, for me.

An OTA HD stream is a maximum of 19.2 Mbit/s (MegaBITS per second) or 8 Gigs per hour.  (I'd love to have multiple TBs on a server!)  The two tuners in an HDHR won't stress a 100 Mbit network connection.  (WiFi, OTOH, often has lag or latency problems.)

On the con side, the RF receiver in the HDHR is not as good as the best available in other TVs and tuners.  If you want to receive distant, obstructed or weak signals, other cards may be better.  Use TVFool, 2150.com, etc, to get an idea about signals available in your location.  Also, the HDHR isn't shielded so WiFi access points and other devices can cause corruption in recordings.  I had to move mine two feet away from the Mac Mini I'm using as the frontend/backend/MySQL server.

I don't think re-encoding the video for your 720p projector is worthwhile.  You have tonnes of disk space and the front-end will do a fine job of deinterlacing 1080i and outputting 720p to the projector.  If you want to load certain recordings onto an iPod or iPhone, then re-encoding is necessary. 

Craig