I am using a single AverMedia DVB-T 771 tuner card (and no other tuner cards in the system) and would like to ‘compare notes’ with anyone else who might be using this card the same way - to record both from DVB (free to air via the antenna socket) and from Cable (Set Top Box via the S-Video socket) at the same time. This is how I set it up, but I don’t know if I went about it the ‘right’ way, so if anyone knows one way or another, please post.
In mythtv-setup:
1) In Video Sources, I set up two sources, one for my Cable channels and one for my Free To Air channels.
2) In Capture Cards, I first added this card as a DVB card (it’s detected as a Zarlink MT352 DVB-T) and the default input is ‘DVBInput’. Then in Input Connections, I mapped it to my off-air video source.
3) I then went back and added a “second” Capture Card (even though there is only one physical card), this time specifying it as a ‘Standard V4L capture card’ and this time I made the default input ‘S-Video’. In Input Connections, I mapped it to my cable video source.
KnoppMyth now reports that I have 2 encoders installed, and to switch from one tuner to the other when watching TV, I press the keyboard's Y button.
Now firstly, a question which is, did I do this right? (because if so, I fluked it.)
Secondly, to the issue I am having - and that is the DVB quality is significantly reduced whenever I am recording from cable at the same time as either watching or recording off-air. Perhaps this is to be expected, eg. am I pushing things to the limit by recording the two sources at the same time?
And finally, if I am pushing things to the limit card-wise, would I get better performance with a hardware encoding/decoding card like the PVR-350 perhaps?
And finally finally, if I went for something like the PVR-350, would that definitely enable me to record both sources at the same time, like the 771 does? Because I think having a single card playing the part of two tuners is pretty nifty, but I don’t know if it’s actually supposed to work this way or not
It just seems odd to me that it's possible at all, if the card is only designed to output one stream at a time