[mythtv-users] OTA/DTV tuner-card related questions, recommendations

Justin The Cynical cynical at penguinness.org
Fri Jan 21 08:23:09 UTC 2011


On 1/20/11 9:03 AM, James Miller wrote:

> To clarify, I don't watch/record very much television--only 1 hr. per
> weekday and maybe 3 or 4 on Sat./Sun. I've gotten by just fine so far
> with a 160 GB drive mounted under /var/lib/mythtv and an 80 GB main hard
> drive. So I'm thinking of making the 160 GB drive the main drive and
> mounting the 500 GB one under /var/lib/mythtv (for a total of 660 GB).
> Anyway, nothing's set in stone on that and I'm not dead set against
> adding a larger drive.

In this case, you probably will want to.  When I switched over to
digital, I noticed that any recorded programmes from the digital side
took up a lot more drive space than what they did when it was being
captured and encoded to MPEG2 with my old analogue card.

Of course, this may vary depending on your local broadcasters and such.


> I've wondered, since starting this thread, whether my machine might be
> doing this sort of scaling. Some of the programming I get through my
> cable connection does say it's available in HD. My video card is a
> GeForce2 MX/MX 400 (AGP). I do have another, better card I was thinking
> of throwing into this machine.

What is the other card you have?  Originally, a geforce 5000 series card
was the card of choice for myth systems due to it's support of XvMC for
MPEG2 decoding/acceleration.  But with the announcement and release of
the VDPAU API, it's really opened up what is possible with older
hardware, assuming you can find an AGP card that supports it (they do
exist, one just has to look a bit harder for them).

See http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU for more info.

> By the way, you say "the difference in visual quality was noticeable."
> Did you mean _was_ or _was not_ noticeable?

Was.  Videos looked better, even scaled down.

*snip*


> I'm not too hot on adding a new device to my network, since all four
> wired ports on my wifi router are presently occupied--meaning I'd have
> to add a switch or something. And yes, like my other outdated equipment
> this is a wireless G router, so I doubt its wireless throughput would
> suffice for the device of which we're speaking--presuming that device is
> capable of connecting via wifi. As may also be evident, my network and
> devices--even the wired side--are not capable of gigabit speeds: will
> traditional 10/100 provide sufficient throughput for the HDHR?

As others have posted, the HDHR doesn't have wireless capabilities, and
wifi is a Not Very Good Choice(tm) for watching an HD stream due to many
factors.

It can be done, I've done it myself on my laptop via my old Linksys 54G,
but if virtually anything was to try to use the wifi when I was watching
something, or the signal wasn't almost perfect, I would suffer from
pauses and the occasional stutter or drop-out.

*snip*

> Does the information I gave above about my video card provide the
> necessary data for determining this?

It does, and the old GeForce cards are not able to 'cut the mustard'.

I read your other post about your attempt to play back 1080i and the
pauses during playback, so it does look like you will need to transcode
the recordings or invest in a video card that supports acceleration
(again, a VDPAU capable card is the way to go) and/or increase the CPU
grunt.


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