[mythtv-users] Need new Capture card...

[Ken Bass]

jedi wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 09:53:41AM -0400, Ken Bass wrote:
>   
>> Andre Newman wrote:
>>     
>>> On 19 Oct 2009, at 14:39, Ken Bass wrote:
>>>
>>> I thought you guys turned all that off a few months ago?
>>>
>>>       
>> Basic cable channels are still unencrypted analog. It was over the air  
>> analog broadcast that was discontinued.
>>     
>
> ...even for that use case, an HD-PVR is not a bad option. It has the
> necessary inputs and what you will end up with is nicely compressed
> and can be played back on pretty meagre hardware. Plus you would be
> ready for HD. You could eventually record those same channels off of
> the component inputs later (HD or SD).
It does look like a nice product, but a bit expensive. The problem is 
that it requires renting a cable box to use it whereas analog PCI/PCIe 
cards do not.
For my purposes, it may be the path I take so I can record the 
HD/encrypted QAM stations, but I am still deciding. I like that is is 
kinda future proof as you say.

I've been using Mythtv since the 0.12 days and have a system running 2 
PCI PVR-250 cards which they no longer make. Newer machines are limited 
in the number of PCI slots, so a dual tuner PCIe sounded great, but does 
not yet support NTCS in Linux. I'm thinking about maybe one of the USB 
type models such as the HVR-1950, assuming that is fully supported. I 
wonder if the USB takes a lot of CPU?