As long as you understand that, I think it's a great place to start. I stared with a BTTV card on a dual celeron 450. It was enough for a proof of concept, but the software encoding of that type of capture card was too much for anything over 320x480 on it. My current setup is a PIII-800 with dual PVR-250's.I know that having a slow machine will affect my experience, but I just want to get familiar with it before I drop a couple hundred bucks more for hardware. So the Hauppauge 250 wouldn't work as well as the 350 you're saying?
My thought on the 250 vs 350 is that the 350 is a waste of money. No offense to anyone using or working on it, but it's a very weird setup with video overlays, non-Xv-accelerated X, and MPEG2-only decode. A 650 MHz machine should *NOT* be "marginal" to play SDTV MPEG2 streams IMO. Remember once upon a time when a 450 MHz machine was fast and playing DVD's on them took about 60% CPU? That's what the Mythbox should be doing, but it seems there are some code optimizations that are necessary.
From what I've heard on the list recently, the internal MPEG2 decodinglibrary has been changed, which helps CPU useage. Of course things are a bit different if you want on-the-fly filters (deinterlacing, etc)... that'll be tough on a 650.
For your setup, I'd recommend getting a PVR-250 if you don't have a bttv-based capture card already to play with. They're <=$100 if you look hard enough, and they'll always be useful. Once the PVR-150's driver is debugged a bit more, it'll be the way to go.
You'll need a vid card that has Xv, which just about any card <5 years old will do handily. NVidia is probably the most used and most debugged, but you certainly don't need anything fancy. Another hand-me-down MX400 or even a TNT2 with tvout will work.
E-bay, but do a little research. A very few of them aren't supported (Rosalyn-based).Dewey, Can you pause and rewind live tv on your machine? I think Khanh is trying to say I won't be able to do that with the 250? I bought an nvidia fx5200 for the video out and a soundblaster card for sound. When I say the Hauppauge cards are hard to come by... go to pretty much any online merchant and every single one of them have those cards backordered :(
-Cory
************************************************************************* * Cory Papenfuss * * Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student * * Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University * *************************************************************************
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