On 4/13/05, Lucien Dunning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > 1) TV tuner hardware. What are people using successfully today? We've > > been looking at ADS Tech, preferably their USB 2.0 solutions to allow > > moving the hardware around more easily if necessary. Has anyone had > > any success with something like Instant TV USB? If not, what hardware > > are you using? Hauppauge? Something else? What sort of quality are you > > getting for both picture and sound? > > I have a hauggauge 250, quality is as good as regular cable. I > definitely suggest getting a card with an onboard mpeg encoder, though > u'll want a cpu fast enough to reecode them to mpeg4 to save space. > And fast enough to play live tv, which my P3 450 128mb doesn't quite > accomplish. If you plan on having multiple tuners, so u can > watch/record more than a single show at a time, the hardware encoding > is going to be an even bigger help. Also with that u'll probably want > to have a good storage set up to deal with all the concurrent reading > and writing. > > If I were to buy again I'd probably go for the pvr350 and get the tv > out and hardware mpeg decoder, its worth the little extra money in my > opinon. > > Or you could look into the new VIA mini-itx boards that have mpeg > decoders on them. I've looked at them a little and they are > attractive, but I'm unsure of the linux support for them. If it does > support them I might look at getting one. Anyone know? > > I haven't heard great things about usb tv tuners, but I never looked > very hard. > > > 2) What PRV app are you using? It seems from the forums that either > > MythTV or Freevo are the preferred apps? Is that the case? > > > I use myth, it works fine for me, it has its issues, but mostly > related to the computer being old and feeble. Mythweb is great, I > probably do more with it than directly through Myth. While I have > never tried any other software, I would definitely recommend myth.
Thanks Lucien. Good info. I think the 250 would be a good choice here. In my case I'm doing this for my dad. He has an Athlon 2600+ with loads of disk space. He also has an LCD monitor from Samsung with a built in TV tuner so he can watch at his desk with that while recording with the 250. My main interest is getting a single channel onto disk, but a 350 might be very cool if this machine could record two programs at once. I agree about the mpeg encoder in hardware. It's a must. thanks, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
