Peter T. Abplanalp wrote:
hi all. i have been interested in setting up a myth box for
quite some time but as i've seen a number of people do, i
wanted to kick the tires a bit. that being the case, i went
out and bought a ati tv wonder pro card, put it in my p2 450
mhz box, installed a fresh fedora core 3 and followed
jarod's howto. well, i got everything pretty much done but
i am having some issues.
at first i set up my card as an mpeg2 card because i thought
it did onboard mpeg2 encoding but that gave me ivtv codec
errors. i checked the list and found that this could mean i
had a v4l card so i changed my setup and now i get live tv
but it is very jerky and my cpu is maxed. i think this
means that my cpu is doing the encoding/decoding and can't
keep up. is that true? does anyone know if the ati wonder
pro does onboard encoding and if so, how do i get that
working?
No. It's a frame grabber. Requires software encoding, so your P2/450
is a bit underpowered.
so, eventhough i don't have a setup that is working very
well, i've decided to take the plunge. it looks from my
reading that most people use the pvr-250/350. i believe the
difference is that with the 250 you need to plug the audio
out of the card into the audio in of the sound card and with
the 350 you don't. is this true and if so, why?
Vice versa. If you use TV out from the PVR-350, TV audio is also output
by the PVR-350. Since any sound that comes from anything other than
MPEG-2 (PVR-x50) recordings comes out the sound card and the sound from
recordings comes out the PVR-350, routing the PVR-350's output into the
sound card allows you to hear TV, videos, music, etc. with a single
output to your speakers/audio receiver.
The PVR-250 does not have any outputs--only inputs. With it, you do
software decoding and output using your video card and sound card.
my next question is about video. from what i understand,
the video comes in via the cable, into the tv card, from
there it gets processed/buffered and sent out via the
graphics card. is that accurate? is the graphics card an
absolute necessity? do i need to look for a graphics card
with some sort of "normal" video out like s-video or
component video?
If you get a PVR-350, you don't need a video card with TV out. (Also,
if you don't upgrade your CPU, you'll probably want to go with the
PVR-350, but as a PVR-350 owner who's not using PVR-350 TV out because
of its shortcomings, I would recommend you instead spend the extra money
you would have spent on the 350 to buy a better CPU/motherboard/video
card. It's far more useful because of commercial flagging, transcoding,
etc. Plus with a good video card, you can get OpenGL and hardware
acceleration of the video--for MythMusic, MythGallery, MythGame, etc.)
actually, can someone please explain how the video and audio
is handled? specifically, how do things need to be wired to
and from the computer.
Depends on what you're hooking up--analog cable, digital cable with
serial control, digital cable with IR control, digital cable with
firewire, satellite with serial control, satellite with IR control, ...
finally, the video is pretty awful when viewed on the
screen. why might that be?
P2/450 and a frame grabber instead of a hardware encoder. Might also be
a bad choice of resolution/bitrate, but you should probably focus on the
encoding problem first (i.e. either get a hardware encoder, a better
CPU/motherboard, or--better yet--both).
Mike
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