I'm putting together a nice little system and have a tuner card and a capture card (PVR-250 and KWorld 878 with radio tuner(whooppiee)). What I want to do is throw both cards in the system and set it up to where the PVR-250 does the majority of the recording and the little bt878 does timeshifting and playback. Since the PVR-250 has no hardware decoder I figure playback on both would be about the same since they would have to use the cpu in the same manner. But timeshifting with the bt878 card would be using the cpu to encode and decode. I know this is possible but is this something would anyone can see biting me in the waahoo later on?

And no, I am not wanting to use the radio tuner on the cheapo bt878 card, I do not need that much torture this early in the game.

under mythtv-setup it has tuner card priority. set the pvr250 to a hight priority and it will try to record with it first, then only record with the lesser card only if card 1 is busy.

depends on your CPU I have pvr250 and leadtek software card with athlon 1700+ and it handles it fine. Just for the record the pvr recordings take much more CPU to play back than the ones from a software capture card because they are MPEG2.

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Xsecrets

Cool thanks. Since I have an Athlon XP 2400 I should be fine in the horsepower department.

But I seem to have found another problem that I can't quite fix with Myth. I bought a PVR-250 from CompUSA, one of their $79 specials after mail-in rebate. It's a model 980 but it will not work with Myth, so I did some research and found this on SnapStream's site:
http://snapstream.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ ... MjUw&p_li=
It has something about that model and revision of the PVR-250 card that CompUSA is selling. Now I am not trying to start a war here, but if windoze apps can't make the card work with the actual drivers shipped from the manufacturer does this mean I'm going to fighting an uphill battle to get this card to work? (and why in the heck did hauppauge change something that worked!!!!!!!) Does anyone have this particular card and been able to get it to work?

not sure what the deal with that card is, but Hauppage has changed the card like 10 times now. that's why lots of people who are getting cards recently have to update the ivtv drivers to get support for the newer tuners.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Well I updated ivtv to the most recent (116 ??? I think it was) because I was only getting snow and static, once I upgraded ivtv I was able to get a frame and sound about every 10 seconds at best. But I did get a little farther with the newest ivtv release.

SWEET!!! I have it working!!! Finally the d@mn thing works. I had to download the 0.1.9 release of ivtv from ivtv.sourceforge.net but it works. Watching TV is a little jumpy for the first second or two for each channel that you change to, but it works. And I followed the instructions for upgrading ivtv from this forum. If I had the link I would post it, sorry.