Newbie question;

Many of the MYTHtv web sites were suggesting an ASUS A8N-VM-CSM motherboard for HTPC's. (It's small, has nVidia 6150 with DVI and analog TV out). Now that I bought one, I'm wondering how to get my tv source (coax cable) into the PC. (There's no TV-in connector).

It appears that you need to buy a TV tuner card to get a TV-in capability ([b]Is this true? Is there a simple TV-in connector to PC available?) [/b]Note that a tuner wouldn't do much good; reception is pretty crappy in my area (small town).

So, why all the interest in these motherboards? Most people seem to buy the Hauppauga PVR tuner cards (even if they have the integrated GPU) which have their own MPEG encode/decoding.

Ken

You are confusing the TV Out part with the TV In. These are totally different animals except on the 350. You need a Tuner/Capture card to get the signal into your computer. You don't have to use the TV part of the tuner card, just the Video in component.

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Girkers

[quote]You need a Tuner/Capture card to get the signal into your computer.[/quote]

I guess you need the capture part of the Tuner/Capture card to digitize the analog TV-in signal. So if you installed a PVR-150, for example, you'd be using the integrated motherboard MPEG decode and GPU functionality. Older motherboards would need to have the more expensive 350 model (which has MPEG decoded TV-out) to operate. Just trying to understand how this ASUS motherboard actually provides useful functionality... Am I thinking about this right?

Not quite.

The decoding support these motherboards have is simply a capability of their Geforce 6xxx series builtin video, much like the support with the Nforce2 IGP motherboards was a capability of the MX4 series video they had. Despite marketing hype It's not a full MPEG decoder, only hardware acceleration for part of it.

Although most people do their MPEG2 encoding using a Hauppauge PVR card, or by capturing a pre-encoded HDTV MPEG2 stream, it's entirely possible to do the encoding and decoding completely in software. For encoding it's less common however because if you're going to do it that way there are more modern/advanced/effecient codecs available like MPEG4. However most folks do their decoding in software. with or without hardware assistance (XvMC, ...).