I have the air2pc along with a PVR350 and a PVR250. They all play nice and I have had good success recording off them simultaneously. I had one time when I lost the last 10 minutes of 2 simultaneous recordings, but that was early days and haven't seen the problem since. The PVR350 is hooked via svideo to dish network, the PVR 250 is hooked to OTA antenna, the air2pc is hooked to same OTA antenna.

I'm using an FX5200 going to an Audio Authority transcoder vga to component device for output.

The computer is a Athlon 2400 (2000Mhz real) CPU with nForce2 chipset, with 512 M RAM and a 200 G harddrive for TV (recordings get moved about once a week to other harddrives so the 200G isn't a problem).

Using mythtv cvs which was originally required for the air2pc card and I decided to just keep it up to date every so often rather than going to .17.

I'm using the libmpeg setting which reduces CPU usage when watching MPEG recordings. So I'm able to use that 2000Mhz athlon with no problem to watch HD! I use Xv (not XvMC) and my CPU usage hovers around 70-80% when watching HD livetv or HD recording. As long as I don't decide to compile mythtv while I'm watching HD content via myth, no problems.

Playback is smooth and so clear that I have to check to see if I'm watching the TV's integrated tuner or mythtv.

The air2pc's tuner seems no better nor worse than my TV's (Sanyo 30") integrated tuner at picking up stations, although the TV's currently hooked up to a different antenna (silver sensor indoor UHF only antenna) while the air2pc card is hooked up to an attic mounted outdoor antenna .

I'd like to buy an HD3000 card, just to compare, since a new DVb style driver has come out for it, but they appear to be out of stock again.

Amy

Interesting results with regard to your CPU usage. What is the HDTV format you are receiving? 720p? 1080i. If 1080i, what are you doing for de-interlacing? do you know how much an improvement yo got by using libmpeg as opposed to ffmpeg?

Big improvement! I run 1080i for most of my HD content, only ABC and sometimes Fox seem to run 720p in this area. I've flipped back and forth between a 1080i and 720p modeline. Currently running with 1080i.

The ffmpeg ran at 90% to 100% (with the resulting skipping when trying to go beyond 100%)

The only downsides to this card so far are related to the dvb scheme used.

1. A valid channel must be specified that can be tuned for the starting channel in the mythtv-setup. Unfortunately, it gets wiped out all the time, requiring it to be refilled out, or a recording setup to record on a good channel. Then delete the recording and the card will tune.

2. The channel setup is kludgy (first define all your transports, then scan for channels on those transports) and the xmlids must be updated manually.

EIT is not working correctly for me right now (the schedule from the transport streams) so I've disabled that.

Amy

Oh and I don't do deinterlacing. Probably an effect of using PVRx50's for so long, but I don't see a need for it on my air2pc card either.

Amy

wow someone out there less discerning about video quality than me, and doing hdtv too.

Even I can't stand the interlacing artifacts that show up when playing back interlaced video on a progressive display.

I'm about to make the jump into the hdtv forray soon I will be posting my success or failures. I am actually recording hdtv right now, but paying it back on svid output at 1024x768, cause my converter didn't work, but I just got a new on in. should have time to install it this weekend.

Oh and just a question, because I haven't looked into it much how do you go about using the libmpeg instead of ffmpeg? is it a compile time option, or can you set it from the gui?

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Xsecrets

So it looks like you can change it from the interface.

Yes it's an option in playback, no need to recompile for it.

I am using the 1080i modeline I have, so wouldn't my display be interlaced? I also have
a 720P modeline, but for watching TV, I prefer the 1080i mode. My TV natively does 1080i, so I guess that should make sense. The jitteriness I was seeing in the gui (for watch recordings) clears up once I move the cursor to scroll through them.

Am I correct in assuming that switching to this libmpeg2 decoder in 0.17 would improve HD3000 recording playback too?

Also, does LiveTV work OK with the Air2PC card?

Thanks for the report.

well I don't know that switching to that library "improves" the playback on any card, what it does is reduce the amout of cpu required to playback mpeg2 streams which would affect anything recorded by pvr250/350, pchdtv3000, and air2pc cards. As far as "improving" the playback it might if you were bumping the cieling of your proccesor.

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Xsecrets

Yes the air2pc works with live tv.

And I'll second Xsecrets, libmpeg is not advertised to improve playback, but to reduce CPU usage on MPEG streams which is all I play on my myth box.

Amy

Yes, poor choice of words on my part. I mean improving my machine's ability to adequately play back a HD stream without choking, not improving quality of image or otherwise.

I didn't think you could get interlaced content displayed properly as an interlaced output from normal graphics cards (which is why I though everyone raves about the PVR-350 output quality). Does anyone know whether Amy is right? Can you get the proper interlaced fields to a TV using an FX5200 (or other similar graphics card) using a modeline? Doesn't sound right to me.

I would also be interested in whether you could use XvMC with your high-def content. If that works I would be sorely tempted to shell for an FX5200. I have an XP1700 processor (which wont cut it for HD decoding) and a GeForce2 (which I don't think supports XvMC), so one way or the other I'm going to need an upgrade to get HD working.

I'm using a component transcoder thing to get the 1080i.

Using the DVI connection, I don't get 1080i (most I can get is 720p) and it looks dreadful on TV (probably due to no deinterlacing being used) . I definitely prefer to use the transcoder. My TV claims that its getting 1920x1080 with the info button, but who knows, it could be getting a "close enough" signal and scaling it somehow.

Amy

Do you have al link or a device name for your component transcoder thing so I can do a bit of research?

check out the hdtv howto over on the wiki It has info about the two most popular ones, and I think most everyone is using the audio authority one. That's what I'm using.

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Xsecrets