My delay fixation stems from trying to get CCTV working reasonably with PVR350s. Even though Hauppauge advertised the suckers as real-time, they weren't (with windows or Linux). Strange since the conextant chip spec sheet shows they can be real-time. I suppose I should let this go. I was thinking this would be really, really annoying for channel surfing, but I forgot to consider that you use the guide for that now =)
regarding cost on minipcs, I was considering a used 800-1000 MHz Pentium/AMD or Celery in a SFF case, not necessarily a new via epia. Agreed it would suck if I lost my network, but if that happens then doesn't the whole frontend go to heck anyhow? I was still planning on leaving the RG59 cable connected to the TV for backup... Does see any benefit to going to GigE? Myself, I've sent 4 MPEG2 streams at once over 100baseT and SMB w/o any noticable delay for storage, but live viewing might be another story. I was really considering doing this anyhow just to make my NFS/SMBed home directories faster. Will take your (and everone elses) advice and go the ivtv route and stop worrying about the delay I guess. Regarding XBOX/PC, the comments seem divided, may just go with a PC so I don't have to deal with all of the modding, and strange distros. Thanks for all the advice, James On Thursday 05 May 2005 05:13 pm, Gavin Haslett wrote: > Maybe I'm sort of missing the point here, but why so stressed about the > delay from live TV? Honestly, my wife and kids use my Myth box and the only > time they even notice the delay (that they've mentioned) is when changing > channels. This causes a 3 second delay or thereabouts while live TV is > cached before the channel "changes". Of course, I know the channel has > already changed... but that's a detail you live with on any PVR, be it > Myth, TIVO or any of the "pretenders to the throne". My wife and kids seem > quite happy to deal with the slight delay for the sake of pausing and > rewinding live TV. > > My setup is a satellite box attached to my Mythbox through an S-Video > connection for video input to a PVR-250 card. Channel changing is done > through a serial cable to the back of the satellite box. I use the guide > built into Myth now instead of the one on the satellite box... in fact > everything's done through Myth now so I find the delay is such a non-issue. > > Catpure Cards: BTTV *might* result in slightly less delay on live TV if you > recode Myth to override the 3 second built-in delay. May or may not be > worth it as in the event your machine gets pegged on the CPU or you have a > glitch on your disk subsystem, you're more likely to get a glitch in your > TV viewing. Not perfect. Also, BTTV just sends raw frames down the PCI > bus... which dependent upon other cards in your system may actually > saturate the PCI bus during high traffic loads. The advantage of capture > cards like the Hauppauge is that they send only MPEG2 data (pre-compressed) > down the PCI bus, therefore saving data bandwidth. My first ever Myth-type > box used a BTTV card... it sucked because (as I later ascertained) I had a > badly behaved bus-mastering gigabit Ethernet NIC in another slot that was > causing latency to other cards on the bus. Now I use a PVR-250 and have > been very happy with the results. I do have some apparent traffic problems, > but I attribute them more to my disk subsystem which is rather slow than I > do the card. 3 BTTV cards on the same bus might be a problem... I'd get > onto doing some mathematics on raw frame speeds down the PCI bus. > > Basically, as far as the frontend, you can get your technical requirements > (fanless, quiet, flash hard disk), but not for less than $200! Even fanless > and quiet with a hard drive is going to cost you more than that > realistically. Be realistic about your requirements. Myself, my frontend is > also my backend... but when I get around to doing a dedicated frontend I'm > going to spend a few more bucks and get quality and quiet hardware. > > Hmm... for a frontend you perhaps might want to consider a modified XBox > (chintzy solution IMO), or a fanless machine using PXE boot to your > backend. Works great, but boy, if you lose your network connection... > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of James Rose > Sent: Thu 5/5/2005 3:35 PM > To: [email protected] > Cc: > Subject: [mythtv-users] PVR Hardware > > > > This may have been answered many times already, but searching the lists > (and google) didn't seem to help too much. > > I'm wanting to build a distributed myth setup (ie one mythbackend and > two > mythfrontends), and I'm wondering: > > 1) What is the best recording card to use? I've got lots of experience > with Hauppauge PVR-350s (I built a 4 channel recorder..w/o myth), but I > find the delay completely unacceptable for live tv. I haven't played > with > IVTV since version 1.9, so maybe this is fixed (seems to be a hardware > issue though). Acceptable delay to me is <1 second. I'm willing to > trade > quality for speed here since I'm recording analog cable to begin with. > My > only other requirement is that it does hardware recording, since this > box > is also my web/mail server (machine is a 2.8GHZ AMD with 1GB RAM, and > 400GB IDE with RAID6/LVM on Debian Sarge). In addition, I plan on > having 3 > recording cards in the box. Are the BTTV devices in general faster than > IVTV? Can all this even be accomplished at this point in time? > > 2) What's the best compromise for mythfronend systems. I've read a lot > of > mixed reviews on using xboxes/ps2s. I'm wanting something really cheap > (around $200/box), and extremely quiet. I'd like fanless, and may skip > the hard drive and go with flash memory. > > MTIA, > > James > > _______________________________________________ > mythtv-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
