On Thu Feb 8 15:50:27 EST 2007, maddog wrote:
High-Def or standard analog? I know Jarod was more familiar with HD
since he has it available and it is not that great a price premium.
Is our audience more likely to have ATSC-only via cable? I don't
think we get much OTA HD up here, and I haven't tried yet the great
tip that I'm likely to have QAM-256-encoded HDTV on my analog cable.
I would be concerned that selecting an HD card might lead to more
support issues, but may be off-base on this.
I think that these days most new cards would support both SD and
High-def.
There's an important distinction to make here between digital SD and
analog SD. Any digital card capable of recording HDTV can also record
digital SDTV. Not all cards have dual-mode tuners that support both
digital *and* analog though, and the ones that do, analog mode requires
using cpu power to encode raw video to a format that can be written to disk.
Again, I have no problem with asking people to purchase a
good card that has a wide range of capabilities (in fact, that sounds
better all the while) if that card is going to be easy to work with and
give good value. If a person already has a card and wants to try to use
it, that is one thing, but if we recommend a card (even with all the
caveats), it should be one that "works".
I'm pretty sure there's gonna have to be at least two recommended cards.
I have to agree with Shawn's assessment of there being at least 3 or 4
major categories of users, and there's currently no single card that
fits the bill for all of them. I think you could serve everyone's needs
by recommending just two cards though:
1) pcHDTV HD-5500
2) Hauppauge PVR-150
The HD-5500 is a dual-mode digital and analog card, which works for OTA
and cable HDTV, as well as digital cable SDTV and analog OTA or cable TV.
The PVR-150 is analog-only, OTA and cable, and can also be fed input
from a cable box or satellite box, if need be. Of course, just now I
catch on to the fact Hauppauge has been tossing HVR-1600 cards in
PVR-150 boxes... Ugh. Okay, this one may need some further thought...
Re: selected distros. If Jarod would be the primary technical
resource, he might be a good one to consult on that choice. I know he
wrote the Fedora Core HOWTO for MythTV, and I don't know how far-
ranging his expertise goes.
I'd definitely advocate for Fedora as a base, but I'm *heavily* biased,
working for Red Hat and all that... :)
However, I've run MythTV on knoppmyth, gentoo, stock debian and ubuntu
at various times over the years, as well as on an Arch Linux-derived
custom distro a guy I know has been working on. Oh, and MythDora.
(Deer in the headlights)
I love headlights. :)
I would not want to "volunteer" Jarod (or anyone) to be the primary
technical resource.
I'll volunteer me.
That having been said, this is an APPLIANCE. It
could have OS/X under it for all I care.....no, I do care.....o.k. any
linux distribution. Fedora core is fine. It is just that the Knoppix
one is so cool in running live off the disk.....does Fedora Core do
that?
Coming VERY SOON... :)
We've only recently gotten our act together with respect to building
Fedora Live CDs. I'm actually trying to get some things done with the
MythDora guys on this front -- basically, a Fedora 7-based Live CD
that's also installable to your hard drive, with some firstboot
integration sitting atop MythDora's current text-driven config menus.
Not sure on ETA for this to fully become a reality though...
--
Jarod Wilson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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