On 19/09/05, Tony McDowell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've been researching MythTV for some time now. I've just come in to a > fair amount of money, so I think it's time to finally get off my duff and > build the MythTV box. > > I have already decided that I'm going to use the Hauppauge PVR-350 for the > video encoding / decoding (nothing fancy, probably just 640x480 for > personal use on the TV).
A good choice. I use one in my main system. You may want to consider a second card in the future to allow LiveTV and recordings to occur at the same time (or 2 simultaneous recordings). > > However, I'd like to know if it's necessary to have an additional video > card for output. I've got plenty of plain-jane video cards with TV-out, > but if the Hauppauge card is doing my MPEG2 decoding, does the decoder also > handle the output of the stream to the TV-out port? As others will testify, the TV-out from the '350 is outstanding, but only handles standard def TV and video (limited to 720x480 NTSC, 720x576 PAL). The decoding aspect of the '350 dumps the feed out of the card (not to the monitor) so by default it outputs from it's TV-out port. Compared with my onboard ATI card, the output is much better. You don't need your video card to have TV-Out, but if you decide the X performance on the '350 is not good enough for non-recorded video, or want to upgrade to HDTV, you'll need TV-Out on the video card. > > Also, what is the X Windows support like for the Hauppauge card? Since I > intend on hooking the MythTV box directly to a TV, can the hauppauge card > drive the TV? Getting better all the time (and very good now). The accelerated X driver for the 350 has come on in leaps and bounds and is now able to play non-recorded content (such as DVD/XVID) very well (perhaps not perfectly though). The X driver comes in the ivtv package with the capture drivers. With the correct xorg configuration, the '350 will happily run your X desktops with no trouble (although at NTSC/PAL resolution) Nick _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
