[mythtv-users] ananolg tuner recommendations

[Brian Wood]

On Tuesday 19 January 2010 03:46:46 pm Mark wrote:
> Be careful whatever analog card you do end up putting in your backend.
> Not very many of the current offerings have hardware compression like
> the old
> PVR-250/350s did.  I just put a couple of Pinnacle 800i HD cards in my
> new backend, which are capable of analog capture, as I am currently on
> analog
> cable, and they are sucking down a pretty large percentage of one whole
> core on my Q6600 Intel processor recording 480x480 2200 bitrate Mpeg4.
> 
> There was a list of cards on the mythtv wiki that indicated which cards
> do hardware compression and analog capture, and it was a pretty short
> list, IIRC.

It's certainly cheaper to just let the CPU do the job, as opposed to putting 
compression hardware on the card. It's the old "WinModem" theory. Now that 
most Windows machines being sold are way overpowered for what the buyers need, 
it almost makes sense.

Most buyers just want to watch TV on their Windows machines, and buy based on 
price, this does not lead to many cards optimized for Myth systems. As you 
said, there weren't that many of them even before the digital changeover.

Maybe we need a reverse Broadcom Crystal HD module, to handle compression.