MythTV's docs for Hardware Requirements is a good starting place, to answer that:
http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1

Beyond that, you get to decide also whether you want to use a tuner which encodes video directly (in hardware), like the PVR-350 for instance, which does MPEG2, or the Plextor USB tuner which does DivX as well, or whether you want a basic compatible tuner where you'll rely on your CPU horsepower to encode the streams.  There are compromises involved, which are prolly better-explained in the project docs, but here's my stab at it:
If you use specialized hardware, you can run the setup from low-power (and/or older) systems -- beware of the storage requirements of MPEG2 though, it is certainly better than raw video, but you're sorta locked in (I've avoided this myself)... I actually like the Plextor offerings, even though they got bashed a bit for not being very OSS-friendly... but it is very configurable, portable, and the divx streams have no trouble being pushed over USB in my experience -- you do need a little more CPU power to playback/decode divx streams as compared to mpeg... humm, what else?  My tuner card is a Hauppage, not their newest model, but it does include an lirc-ready remote and an FM tuner, which I enjoy.  Beware of non-compatible cards  :)
You can also buy various MythTV boxes ready-to-go if you're *not* looking for a project, but it has gotten much easier and there are bootable CD's and good installers now (used to be a bit of a pain).

good luck!

    Ben



On 8/31/06, Brian Gallagher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My neighbor has MythTV and I'm jealous!  What kind of tuner video cards
are recommended?

Ben Barrett wrote:
> Right -- the boards on sale do not have tuners; composite-in, plus an
> rs-232 for alarm & sensor.
> They're updating their LMLCD,
> http://linuxmedialabs.com/ISO/livelmlR01.iso
> <http://linuxmedialabs.com/ISO/livelmlR01.iso > is the new release...
>
>     Ben
>
>
> On 8/29/06, *Bob Miller* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
>
>     Ben Barrett wrote:
>
>     > LinuxMediaLabs is having a "back-to-school" sale until the end
>     of August on
>     > their 4- and 8-channel-in linux-friendly video cards, fwiw:
>     > http://linuxmedialabs.com/
>     > Only a few more days :)  Hope this helps -- re: Garl's query in
>     March.
>
>     For recording broadcast TV, four channels is severe overkill.  With a
>     single-tuner TiVo, we saw 3-5 conflicts a week.  With dual tuners,
>     that dropped to ~1/month.
>
>     Commercial TV shows are rebroadcast enough times that you can almost
>     always find a schedule that gets everything you're interested in.
>     (TiVo does that automatically with a quite clever scheduling
>     algorithm.  I don't know about MythTV.)
>
>     If you're building a video surveillance system or interactive art
>     installation, though, those boards might be just the ticket.
>

_______________________________________________
EUGLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug

Reply via email to