I am in the process of planning a system for Myth for analog TV. I am planning on using the popular PVR-250 as a tuner/encoder input board.

I would like to understand possible upgrade paths for when I eventually update my home TV to HD in the next year or two. Folks have mentioned that it takes alot of CPU power to receive/decode HD via a card such as the HD3000. This appears to be for over-the-air reception of HD.

My thought is that at that time I would be able to get the HD already in a digital form such as through the Firewire port of the cable box. I have a friend who built a HTPC running Windows and he does just that. He had told me that some cable boxes have the Firewire output disabled.

Does Myth support (at this time) getting HD input that is already digital such as from Firewire? And if so, would this be less demanding on the CPU? My current plan is something like an Althlon XP 3000, but maybe if I eventually want to upgrade to HD I would be better off with a fast P4.

Thanks for any insight into this.

Mike

The difficulty with HDTV isn't GETTING the program. Recording HDTV either from a card like the HD-3000 or from firewire is relatively low-stress on the computer. It's PLAYING BACK the program that brings the PC to its knees. All sources of HDTV are already encoded in MPEG2-TS, whether from OTA broadcast or cable channels. It's DECODING the material that requires the horsepower. Some have reported success with AMD64 (3G+) systems. All users of P4 (3G+) systems have reported success.

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and yes mythtv does support recording from firewire, at least with the motorola 6200 cable boxes, there are proabably success stories with other boxes too, but the one I hear all the time is the moto 6200, though in theory it is standard, but we all know how that plays out.

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Xsecrets

My setup is Sempron 3000+, 512mb ddr, old ge force mx440 video, hd3k card. I can watch HD recordings flawlessly on my monitor, though CPU is 90+% busy.