Hello Folks,

Last summer, I purchased an ATI Wonder VE tuner card with the hopes of using it to build a PVR. Unfortunately, I was never able to get it to work to my satisfaction with home brewed software solutions available in Debian (Sarge) and my desktop system (AMD2600-512M, Nvidia 5200-128M).

I've decided to give it another go with KnoppMyth.

I have an old fileserver (AMD2000-512M, Rage128-128M) that I'm going to use for this project. The question is should I use the Nvidia5200 or can I get away with the Rage128. Does the video card itself come into play (encode/decode) when recording from cable TV.

I won't be watching recorded shows on the above system, I'll just copy them over to my desktop system to watch.

Any comment's or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

G

The video card will play no part in encoding the video. Capture cards like the PVR-x50 receive analog tv broadcasts and encode them to MPEG-2 in hardware meaning that there is very little CPU usage require. Other cards that some people refer to as frame grabbers require the compression to be done in software. If your card is one of these, then the CPU will be used for compression. Digital tuner cards (ATSC and DVB) take the bit stream from digital tv broadcasts directly off the air so then only need a small amount of cpu too. If you are not looking at the videos on your myth box, the graphics card doesnt matter. anything that works with linux will do.

That should actually work quite well with KnoppMyth, although double check that the capture card is supported by the bttv drivers or other v4l compliant drivers. With a simple YUV frame grabber you'll need to jumper the the soud output from the card back into the line input on your soundcard and set up transcoding but you've got a fast enough CPU there with enough RAM.