[mythtv-users] Upgrade Suggestions - currently on myth 0.21 with PVR150, 250, 350

[Raymond Wagner]

On 7/2/2011 18:36, James Pifer wrote:
> Good suggestion. I'm in Charlotte, NC in the US. Cable provider is Time
> Warner. No set top boxes, basic cable. Only HD is tuned by digital
> tuners in my TVs. It's "regular" coaxial connections and I assume atsc.

If you're currently using analog cable, don't expect to be able to 
continue using that in the long term.  Cable providers are all switching 
over to digital to free up bandwidth for additional channels and 
internet.  Start planning an upgrade for your frontends to support HD.  
For digital broadcasts (ATSC) and unencrypted digital cable (clear QAM), 
you're looking at MPEG2 at up to 18Mbps.  Any desktop AMD64 or Core2, as 
well as most mobile processors of those architectures, should have 
plenty of power to handle that content.

>>> Are there any low priced, non-PCI options for replacing my Hauppauge
>>> cards?

As a non-PCI replacement to those cards, you want to look into the 
HVR-2250.  It has two tuners that can either be used for digital or 
analog, an MPEG encoder for each, and uses a PCIe x1 slot.  The 
HVR-1800/1850 is also available, however there is a bug in the driver 
that prevents that card from being used for analog capture within MythTV.

>>> I also run a pretty powerful xen server and I know I could put
>>> mythbackend on there, but I can't use the PCI cards. I would have to
>>> replace the tuner cards. I could pass through some USB ports.

Unless you need to run multiple different operating systems 
simultaneously, or need to ensure complete isolation for testing or 
debugging purposes, it's best to avoid virtual machines and just run 
directly on the base system.