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PostPosted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 11:07 pm 
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Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2005 10:55 pm
Posts: 3161
Location: Warwick, RI
Hi,
My son-in-law ran his BBs on a Trash80 with four floppies... sorry, wandered a little.....

As I mentioned previously, the video card is where it is really important. I have a 3ghz with an agp PNY 7600 and it does HD nicely but the cpu is still very busy. My 2.4mhz will play the 720 stuff if I use an agp 5200 nvidia card. I think it is a PNY card also.

I have been seeing a couple of recent posts for a better driver for the newer nvidia cards that off loads a lot of the processing to the video chip. VDCPU or something along those letters. Maybe follow those to see what it offers for ideas.

One other "small" item and that is if you don't have a HD TV then you would only be able to view on the computer monitor as I know my cards only have vga or dvi.

You can still record analog with the 350.
Mike


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PostPosted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 3:02 pm 
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Joined: Fri May 21, 2004 11:55 pm
Posts: 1206
Location: Silicon Valley, CA
abigailsweetashoney wrote:
3) If I spend money for a good MBE and put all my tuners on it, can I still keep my P4-2.4mhz as a FE?

Save your money on the backend cpu. (Maybe bring your TRS-80 out of retirement. :P ) Recording digital shows is effortless because the shows are already in digital format. The recorder card just demods the signal and hoses it to the disk drive. Something like 1% cpu usage per stream.

Playing back streams is where the heavy lifting occurs. Especially if you elect to decode the MPEG2 in software (where, frankly, the best results are obtained). Hardware decoding is making progress and has the promise of reducing CPU load dramatically for FE machines.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 03, 2009 9:48 am 
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Joined: Sun Oct 15, 2006 6:46 pm
Posts: 5
I'm a Linux noob, and plan on getting Knoppmyth for ease of setup. I don't have a computer setup to do anything with the TV yet. I was planning on using my older AMD 1200 box with a PVR-350 so I could record and watch TV at the same time.

Digital cable seems to have put a big snag in that idea! It seems that I can't record HD content or digital content without going through the set-top box. Sort of makes sense, in that the cable company wants the income from STB rentals, and I believe there are 2-3 different digital transmitting/encoding methods used (that last might not apply -- might just be NA/Europe, and I'm in NA).

As it stands, it looks like the only way I can use my current hardware and record digital TV broadcasts is to connect the signal from the STB to the input on the PVR-350, thus losing a lot of the power of MythTV. In effect the MythTV box becomes a glorified (and dumb!) DVR, only capable of recording what I'm watching, or rather whatever the STB is outputting.

This isn't the ideal situation, but I suppose it's better than buying a Tivo or something like that. It will be more like the DVD recorders with built-in hard drive. Only Phillips still makes one of those, and it's reportedly not the best of them. The only plus to using MythTV instead is I get to watch internet TV shows, the juke box, and photo viewer as well.

Is there any problem with setting up this way (STB>MythTV>TV set)? I mean other than the loss of features. I'm thinking using MythTV is a better solution with less overhead than using the Windows applications that came with the PVR-350.

What's the talk about a firewire feed from an STB? Would that actually work with MythTV? I have a Motorola Digital DCT 2244 STB with IR, S-video, and "data" (looks like a serial port... didn't count pins) connectors, and a "TV Pass Card" slot (covered... didn't pop the cover off). No firewire. Maybe need to see if there is an upgraded box? Another thing... if I bought my own box would it work, or would I have to have it activated by the cable company?

One last thing... any thoughts about something like www.mytvpal.com integrated with MythTV?


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 11, 2009 10:25 pm 
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Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 2:55 pm
Posts: 245
Location: South Jersey
Unfortunately you'll probably need to buy new hardware like myself. I am keeping my pvr-350 for now for svideo out to the 4:3 tv. But to record I bought some pcHDTV cards. I seriously thought about the HD Home Run but couldn't justify a SIXTH computer running 24x7 in my house. (Yes I need to start thinking about virtualizing! :-)

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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2009 9:57 am 
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Joined: Sun Oct 15, 2006 6:46 pm
Posts: 5
Well, what's the recommended hardware for HD+SD content? I have limited HD channels available, but my cable company is mostly digital (just 10-15 analog channels, local and a few news channels mostly). Since I can run more than one tuner card, sounds like keeping the PVR-350 for S-video and using an inexpensive HD tuner card for recording (as abigail is doing) is the short-term ticket.


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 12, 2009 10:37 am 
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Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 2:55 pm
Posts: 245
Location: South Jersey
Using the pvr-350 as video out for sd recordings is fine but for hd recordings you'll need a good video card. Since I'm ultra-cheap I bought a pci card with 256 meg svideo, svga, and dvi output. I then bought a cheap dvi to hdmi cable to input into my $499 walmart special hd ready tv :-)

I did a reasonable amount of research on video cards by looking at the forums here (which specifically state what hw works and what doesn't) and more importantly I looked at Human's "Dragon" hardware spec. I like shopping at amazon.com but they don't always have great prices. Tigerdirect.com, 3btech.net, and newegg.com seem to have the best prices. I also read that a lot of west coast people buy from "Fry's" but until recently I had never heard of them. Good luck.

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R6.04, dual core 3ghz, 3 gig memory, Zotac 8400 passive heat sink dvi/hdmi out video, 500 gig sata, dual tuner hdhomerun, streamzap remote

Abby


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 23, 2009 5:06 pm 
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Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2006 2:55 pm
Posts: 245
Location: South Jersey
I now how my pcHDTV card in the SBE. When I scan for channels I get only 29% signal and the X window crashes and I'm left back at the xterm shell.

Is there something special I need to do to get this working? I've tried running the mythtv-setup as root and mythtv with no luck. Any advice is appreciated.

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R6.04, dual core 3ghz, 3 gig memory, Zotac 8400 passive heat sink dvi/hdmi out video, 500 gig sata, dual tuner hdhomerun, streamzap remote

Abby


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