[mythtv-users] hvr-1600 vs pvr-500 for capturing

[aaron]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 10:47, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>
> I try to stay away from USB devices when I can, they seem to use a lot
> of resources on Linux systems, and lead to to what can only be called a
> "clusterf**k" of cables, especially when they are not bus-powered and
> require yet another wall wart and its associated cables. Certainly
> external USB drives never seem to come close to the claimed performance.
>

As someone with four USB drives connected to his Myth box (3x1TB,
1x2TB), I can vouch for the rat's nest of cables and wall warts. The
wall warts are particularly annoying since it means I need even more
wall sockets since some get covered.

The performance isn't great, but it does tend to be good enough in
most cases, at least for my needs of SD MPEG2 video. Although there
can be lags when there are several things going on at once.

IMHO, one of the flaws in the USB design was putting the processing
load on the CPU, which is probably why we see high resource usage. I
also see periodic hangs with the USB bus (at least, I think that's
what's happening), causing pauses in playback, sometimes playback
aborting, and occasionally dropped segments in recordings.

Some months ago I decided I needed to repartition one of my 1 TB USB
drives. So I copied the contents to another 1 TB USB drive,
repartitioned and then transferred the data back. It took all day.
Loads of fun, I tell you. ;-)

Although, since I don't have enough dedicated USB ports, I have to go
through a hub... which certainly doesn't help... and adds another wall
wart.

I would have much preferred to use internal drives but, (a) I don't
have any free drive bays in the case, and (b) the motherboard doesn't
support SATA.

aaron