[mythtv-users] Can Mythtv record uncompressed video from PVR-150? (my Comcast solution)

[Bill Bogstad]

As Comcast moves towards turning off clear-QAM in my area, I've been
working on resurrecting my PVR-150s for use with the 'free' DTAs.  One
of the nice things about the SD clear-QAM that Comcast sent was that
it took about half the disk space for the same length recording that
the PVR-150 did.  (And to my eye with better overall quality.)  I
could transcode to a better format, but I wondered if there was a way
to get the uncompressed stream from the card in order to avoid the
quality issued which can be introduced by transcoding.   From what I
have found on the web, it's possible to get the raw audio/video stream
before encoding is done. on these cards.  The Mythtv page for the
PVR-500 even mentions it:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Hauppauge_PVR-500

/dev/video0 – The encoding capture device (Read-only)
/dev/video24 – The raw audio capture device (Read-only)
/dev/video32 – The raw video capture device (Read-only)
/dev/radio – The radio tuner device
/dev/vbi0 – The "vertical blank interval" (Teletext) capture device

So my question is:  Has anyone ever configured MythTV to treat the
PVR-150 (or similar cards) as a dumb capture card rather as an MPEG
capture stream?
If so, what did it take to set it up?

Thanks,
Bill Bogstad