Outside of my Myth box, I have a digital tuner receiving OTA (over the air) digital television. If you are receiving standard OTA analog and you've never experienced DTV, you may be in for a surprise. It's free of course, and, generally, the analog stations you get now you will be able to also get digitally.

Some may be HD (high definition), some may not. Regardless, the signals come in crystal clear with no ghosting, noise, etc. Some stations are multi-casting with their allotted bandwidth allowing you to pick up as many as four or so SD (standard definition) signals on a given frequency. In my area, it means that a PBS station can run a kids channel, politics, etc. simulataneously on different "sub channels" allowing you more choices.

And then, of course, there is HD. I have a Toshiba HD (tube) display and it is nice.

So here are some thoughts, questions....

— What is the state of DTV support in Myth? I'm aware of the MyHD card ($200) but it is simply a tuner. Can a typical (read approx. 2GHz) PC handle the playback of HD data without hardware assist?

— If hardware assist is preferable, which hardware and how much?

— Is the MyHD card the only option?

— How about Hauppage and a digital version of the 350? (rumors?)

— I thought I saw someone mention 18 GB/hour for HD. Ouch. Is this for real? The HD signal is already compressed (MPEG2 I believe), so I would expect the MyHD card to simply dump the stream to the drive. I thought HD was something like 18.5 Mbits/second — unless I screwed something up on the calculator, that ought to be more in the 7 to 8 GBytes per hour.

— And since much of what you pick up is SD (standard def.) I would hope the MyHD card would dump less data to the drive....

— And does KnoppMyth support the MyHD card?

At $200, it's a bit of a pricey thing to dabble in only to find you can't get it to work. If I was more comfortable with Linux in general and Myth specifically, I might take the plunge....

I don't mean to sound alarmist or naive, but I really have begun to feel like the days of analog TV are waning. I got a PVR250 because it's a known quantity and it works, but I wish my PVR was recording content as beautiful as the images I've grown acustom to see on my digital tuner.

Thoughts? Comments?

john calhoun—

I suppose you are talking about the pchdtv card, and according to their site and what I've read yes with a nvidia card that supports xvmc which is motion compensation in hardware, but not full hardware decode. At this point this is the best option, because all other full hardware decoders output svid, and that can't give you anywhere near the 720P rez you want for hdtv. You need a vga->component converter.


to my knowledge that is the only true hdtv card with linux drivers available, and the community seems to be flocking to it, and it was designed specifically for linux and doesn't even have windows drivers, so it is probably your best bet. I think there are some dvb cards that have drivers for the European stuff.

not familiar with this one.


one review I read said 25Gb for 3 a 3 hour show, so I would think your 7 to 8 Gb/hr sounds about right.

don't know about that as I haven't had an extra $200 myself. keeping my fingers crossed though.

well there is some support built into 0.14, but it takes a special xine for playback and I'm pretty sure that is not included in knoppmyth, so you would probably have to compile that.

you might want to go to http://www.pchdtv.com and take a look at the forums to get a feel for the status.