[GRLUG] MythTV

[Ron Lauzon]

Tim Schmidt wrote:
> Unfortunately, with MythTV, you tend to get what you pay for.  The
> cheapest tuner I feel OK reccomending is a PVR150...  They require a
> bit of setup as mentioned earlier.  eBay helps.  The cheaper
> BTTV-based cards don't produce great output.  They're OK, just not
> great.
>   

I'll second that.  The cheap frame-grabber cards are very poor.  Pay the 
extra for a MPEG encoder card (like the Hauppauge PVR cards) and you 
will have a much nicer DVR experience.

Also, my current DVR is a 2.5Ghz Pentium with 1GB RAM and something like 
300 GB hard drive space (shows are typically 1 GB per half hour - and I 
need room for my MP3s since this box is also a server for my Squeezebox 
and any videos I download from the Internet).  It has 2 PVR-250 cards 
(which comes in very handy on sweeps week) and an nVidia PCI video card 
with S-Video out (a cheap card - nothing special).  It's running 
Mandriva 2006 and MythTV 0.18.

So far, I have had no issues with recording 2 shows, watching 1 while 
the system finds the commercials for another show in the background.

My system definitely wasn't cheap, but it is very reliable and very 
useful.  I believe that I have more than gotten out of it what I've put 
into it.

> For really nice systems, the Plextor TV402U is an external USB2 tv
> tuner that does MPEG2 and MPEG4 in hardware...  saving some disk space
> compared to the PVR-series cards.  They're $200 MSRP unfortunately.
>   

I thought that MythTV didn't work with the USB tuners.

-- 
Ron Lauzon - rlauzon at acm dot org
   Homepage: http://7lauzon.home.comcast.net/
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Microsoft Free since July 06, 2001
Running Mandriva Linux 2006