ello there. just joined.. and really excited about building a pvr. but im totally doing it on the cheap tho.. cause.. well.. im a tight arse. I also live in australia and a pvr -350 is very expensive here... around $500. given that i basically stole all my other hardware from work.. i dont wanta spend that much

so im thinking mabey i should try an alternative.. if everything works fine i can slowly upgrade my stuff and sell whatever on ebay.. or whatever... can you guys recommend viable tuner alternatives? i guess my $$ issues mean that ill need to the non-hardware encoding type.. ive read the forum so i know that its gona limit what i can do with my box.. but at least i can get things up and going.. and at this point thats all im after.

i guess the other option is that i get a pvr-350 shipped over from the states. ive been looking on amazon.com and i can pick one up for like $180US ... which is what.. $260 odd australian.. even sticking me for postage im still gona come out ahead. can anyone think of a reason why this isnt a good idea? we use PAL over here.. but these days our tv's can handle both formats... we also use 240 volts over here.. i think the US is alot lower than that... but thats not an issue for a pci card is it only a power supply? im just throwing stuff out there...

anyho... cheers... and be good!

stevearama.

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"enter witty comment here"

You need to tell us more about you hardware before we can offer constructive suggestions.

Using a hardware encoding/decoding capture card will let you get away with less CPU horsepower. If you've got plenty of CPU horsepower software based decoding and encoding will let you get away with a cheap capture card. This is all covered in the FAQs and elsewhere on the wiki.

http://knoppmythwiki.homelinux.org/faq/
http://knoppmythwiki.homelinux.org/

Yes, I'm telling you to RTFM, but at least partly because you didn't provide enough detail. Happy Holidays!

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Also I believe the reason that most people recommend the pvr250/350 is because we know that it's supported by the ivtv driver if it's a newer version it may need a newer version of the driver, but it's pretty much assured to work.

Whereas on the software cards it's very difficult to know what chip it will have on it, because almost every manufacturer now has released and incompatible chip on every model they sell with no way to differentiate. So it is very difficult to find a software based solution that you can reliably reccomend.

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Xsecrets

thanks for your replies guys..

as i said.. i borrowed.. well stole pretty much.. all the hardware from work. its a P2-mmx ... 350mhz. 256mb sdram. 6g hhd. gf4 64mb video, isa sound card and an old network card. i installed mandrake 10.1 just to check that everything was suported by linux and it was all fine except for the network card. ill play around with it or get a new one.. thats not the issue.

as i said.. ive got this setup just to see the posibility's of pvr. and ill get new hardware as i can find it on ebay. theres no need to point out the inadequacies of the hardware... i know.

obviously i need a tuner card.. i figured with that chip im totally gona need hardware encoding and probably also decoding... plus even after ive upgraded the rest of the hardware, such a card will improve performance...

ive browsed the forum.. obvioulsy theres loads of references to tuner cards, but as far as i can tell the pvr-250 and 350 are the most common becasue of their on board encoding / (decoding). my hassle is that they're like $500 here... which sucks.

so id hoped someone could recomend a card with hardware encoding abilities but at a lower price.

one alternative is the ADAPTEC VIDEO DVD MEDIA CENTER PCI .. its apparently got hardware encoding.. and its $250 ...



... as i dont know much about these i figured id ask for advise so i dont get my pants pulled down by getting the wrong card.......

or could let me know if importing a card from the US is a good or bad idea.... given it'd be so much cheaper to do so.

thanks lads.

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"enter witty comment here"

the only tuner card that MIGHT be the pvr350. That hardware is SEVERLY underpowered.

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Xsecrets

To elaborate on Xsecrets reply, your use of a Pentium II for MythTv is unique and if you are successful your bold accomplishment will be hailed by cheap arses around the world!

To be sure, your only hope of getting MythTv to work is to offload the work of encoding the video stream into MPEG2. Your chosen processor will only be fast enought to spool the video stream to your hard disk. You will also need hardware-assisted playback, which your GeForce4 card offers.

Still I would not expect to record at a very high resolution with this setup. And I do not expect you will be able to watch one program while recording another. Your choice of hardware will severely compromise the usability of your box.

Oh, another tip for cost saving -- the PVR-250 has the same recorder as the 350 but does not include built-in TV out video. Since you already have a GeForce4 graphics card, you probably don't need the 350, only the PVR-250.

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well yes he can try using xvmc on the pvr card, but unless I'm mistaken xvmc still takes more processing power than using pvr350 tvout. of course pvr350 tvout is a pita to setup, and will certianly never be able to play divx/xvid in that sytem, but then again I don't think anything will smoothly play xvid/divx on that system.

_________________
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Xsecrets