I picked up an x-pert tv-pvr by v-stream on newegg
TV TUNER KWRLD CAPTR VS-TV878RF (Qty=1,Price=$36.50)
It seems to allow mpeg4 encoding and playing back on athlon 2500 systems although I think if you turn the settings way up, you get a little slow down. I probably need to switch away from reiserfs as per the recomendations eventually. (kernel 2.6.10)
These cards seem to have a bit of area digitalized that doesn't have picture when connected to my dish network receiver. This is nothing new. I got the same results when I used ati all in wonder cards in windows so I don't think its a fault of the card.
One possible advantage of recording directly in mpeg4 is if you can avoid transcoding it later when you make the final copy. I don't know if thats possible. Of course the mpeg4 versions will take up less disk space, but the mpeg2 versions will likely be a little sharper in the short term. (Mpeg2 was last I looked a little sharper than mpeg4 when data rates aren't an issue, but that may have changed. It was a close thing anyway.)
Afaik with the Hauppage cards that do mpeg encoding in hardware and feed the stream as needed, so you don't use any cpu time.
What I would really like that will _NEVER_ happen is a dish network receiver that works directly with myth and allows the decrypted mpeg2 signal from the satellite to be used directly. That way there is no further loss until transcoding occurs.
What I would eventually like to see is a lossless codec available for the recording process like huffuv. (There may be something better, but the main thing is for it to be lossless.) That way you could set the device to record using that and then transcode to the final form using as agressive of encoding options as you wanted. (Afaik huffuv is basically motion jpeg with the error encoded with huffman encoding.) With that kind of approach you could, theoretically get better results than encoding to mpeg2 first with a hardware card, but those results come at the cost of a lot of disk space, at least for a little while. Note, that this kind of codec would likely be too bandwidth intensive to work across a network unless you had gigabit networking.
I'm not sure about the rest. You really need someones opinion that has compared these side by side. The quality of the electronics involved can sometimes have a non trivial impact
-Robert
Dan Christensen wrote:
I'm about to order the components for a system that will run MythTV (as well as do other things), and I have a few questions.
I'm trying to decide between the PVR-250 and the 350, or maybe even something without hardware encoding. I was thinking that I would store video in a format that allows for higher compression, e.g. MPEG-4. So is there any point in using a card which does encoding in hardware? In fact, would using one of the Hauppauge cards mean that video would need to be decoded and then re-encoded, and would this cause a loss in quality?
For playback, I believe the 350 can only decode MPEG-2 in hardware. Can it display video that is decoded in software? Or would such video need to be played through a separate video card?
I'm not very familiar with Dolby audio. Is support for this something that people find useful when using MythTV?
Thanks for any tips,
Dan
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