On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 12:50:54 -0800, Richard J. Sears <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Here is the plan for the backend: > > HD-3000 HDTV PCI Card > > Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 (someone said you cannot watch DVD's with this > card, has that been corrected, or should I stick with the 250..?) >
As pretty much everyone else mentioned, you only need the 350 if you have a combined frontend/backend system. For any encoders in the backend I'd stick with the 250 (or possibly a 150 or 500 as they are much cheaper and the ivtv developers seem to be very close to supporting the 150 quite well). That being said, you may want to be careful about how many tuners you put into your backend. I don't have any specifics on this, but I know I've seen posts from people talking about bottlenecks on the PCI bus when too many tuners are active in the same system. There are several people on the list that have master backend/multiple frontend systems and they seem to like a few tuners in the backend and a single tuner in some of the frontends. Considering that all of the PVR-xxx cards do hardware encoding it's not going to cost you much, if any, CPU on the frontends to do capture there and it might save you a lot of headache trying to work out bottlenecks on the backend machine. I currently use a pvr-350 in a combined frontend/backend machine (athlon 1400+) and the TV-out quality is amazing. However, I am unable to use mythgame because the -350 tv-out doesn't support any kind of hardware acceleration and I sometimes have trouble with dvd playback for the same reason. If you're planning to playback dvd's on your frontend systems I'd highly recommend avoiding the -350 and going with an nvidia card (a lot of people seem to recommend the FX5200 or FX440). > Do I need a real good video card for this system since it will not be > hooked to a TV at all...? > Nope, any card will do for setup and you probably don't even need a monitor at all once the system is up and running. In fact, my combined FE/BE system only uses the -350 tv-out and that doesn't even display anything until X starts and fires up mythfrontend. > Do I need a decent sound card to capture the sound, or will the ivtv > driver work for both the 250/350 and the HD-3000 > Definitely not for the -250, but I have no idea on the HD-3000 (I don't get HD programming yet). > How powerful of a CPU do I need to handle the HDTV stuff. I realize that > the 350 has a builtin hardware mpeg encoder/decoder, but I am not sure > about the HDTV side of the house. > Pretty much anything will do in the backend as it's just writing data directly to disk. However, your frontend machines will need to be pretty powerful as they need to decode the HD stream and display it. I believe I saw somewhere that someone has an athlon 2700+ (or something close to that) and it's ALMOST fast enough to do live tv in HD. > Do I need a separate tuner card in the backend system for each frontend > system in order for them to watch separate 'live' channels..? SO if I > had 3 frontend systems that wanted to watch different 'live' channels, I > would need 3 x PVR-350's..? > Again, you won't need the -350, but yes, you will need a separate tuner for each concurrent channel being watched (this includes live TV on all backends as well as any current recordings). As I mentioned earlier, you may want to look into placing a tuner in several of your frontends (effectively making them slave backends also). This will offload some of the burden from the master backend as well as providing a local tuner for live TV on those frontend systems. Also, keep in mind that if you have 3 pvr-xxx cards and a single HD card you will be able to watch live SD tv on 3 frontends (as long as nothing is being recorded), but you will only be able to watch HD on a single frontend at any given time (unless you're recording an HD program in which case you won't be able to watch live HD tv at all until the recording is complete). So, if you want to be able to watch live SD or HD tv on all 3 frontends at any given time you'll need at least 3 pvr-xxx cards and at least 3 HD encoders as well. > On the frontend, I assume that I need > > 1) Hard Drive > 2) Good Video Card > 3) Good Sound Card > > The hard drive does not have to be that big because its only going to > run the front end application correct..? No need for mysql, and all the > extra stuff that had to been installed in the backend, or am I incorrect > here..? > Exactly correct. I have a single 8GB hard drive in my combined FE/BE system (the drives for storage are mounted from my NFS server in the back room). If you plan to hook the frontend systems to a home theater receiver you should look into a sound card that has spdif optical output. I believe many people here have sung the praises of the Turtle Beach Riviera card. (I personally use a Zoltrix Nightingale card, but you'll probably be hard pressed to find one of those still for sale). > On the video card, I was told to use a card that supported XV. I was > hoping to use a nice ATI or NVidia that would support component out as > opposed to composite or S-Video. But how powerful of a card do I need > You probably want to avoid ATI cards as I believe the drivers for them are still proprietary and can cause some headaches. Nvidia cards are very well supported under linux and many people (including all of the developers) are using nvidia cards for tv-out with great success. > Also, how powerful a machine and video card do I need on the front end > to watch the HDTV stuff, or is all of that processing done on the > backend system and just streamed to the frontend..? I was thinking of > running the ASUS Pundit as my front end systems (with a different video > card (if necessary)). As mentioned above you will need a pretty powerful machine on the frontend to playback HD content. I've never used the Pundit myself, but I believe, from other posts I've seen here that it probably won't have enough horsepower to do what you want. Hope that helps. Brad _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
