On 08/10/05, Jules Bean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The system will be for watching DVB-T digital broadcast TV, as well as > DVDs. This means that it presumably doesn't need to be terribly > powerful from a CPU point of view? No encoding or transcoding to do. > It will be in the living room, under the TV, so it has to be quiet and > look reasonable. No HDTV; I doubt we'll have HDTV DVB in the UK for a > few years.
For few, read "likely when hell freezes over ...!" Just wait until they start pumping out proper 1080 video and all those people who bought HDTV-ready plasmas and LCDs (with a native v-res of 720 pixels) realise they've been shafted... > One of the key branch points seems to be on the source of TV-OUT > support. On the one hand their are the cute little VIA boards with > built in TV-OUT, a graphics chip well supported under linux, in the > mini-ITX form factor. The problem with these is that I really want 2 > tuners, and I don't much like the idea of USB tuners dangling off the > back of what is supposed to be a neat little machine. It *is* possible > to buy 2-card PCI risers, but I don't know if they are reliable, or if > they even fit inside the > cases. (http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/PCI_Risers.html) > (but only the most expensive epia, the EPIA SP has SATA, and I think I > probably want SATA?) SATA provides better airflow in a small case (much better cable management if the board builders manage to orient the SATA plug the correct way and close to the HDD cage (and supply a short cable). If you want to keep things simple, make sure the SATA controller is supported by the distro's kernel. > The other approach would be a standard mini-ATX motherboard, in a case > large enough to take at least low-profile PCI cards (the AverTV 771 is > low-profile, I believe). This would probably mean a socket 939 setup > with a cheap AMD64 chip and some expensive quiet fans, and an > expensive quiet case. But the sticker is the graphics card. I gather > that most people on this list are either using the TV-OUT abilities of > their Haupage PVR cards, or are using GeForce cards. A Haupage is > clearly pointless in a DVB-only setup, and I really, really, really > don't want to have an nvidia card, and nvidia's closed drivers, on the > box. The sensible option then seems to be a cheapo Radeon 9250 TV-OUT, > which is supported by the gatos drivers. Supported my the fglrx ATI drivers too I should think. I'm still happily using my ATI 9100IGP on-board TV-Out (haven't swapped back the PVR-350 now that the xv support is there) and have not problems at all (aside from a very slight trapezoid distortion on the LHS) > Does anybody have any feedback on this? It's the PCI riser I'm most > scared about, I don't understand PCI deeply enough at the hardware > level to know if they provide good enough performance for two DVB > tuners running in parallel. The obvious solution - dual tuner DVB cards - are on the horizon, so it depends how long you are prepared to wait! My Pundit-R system has 2 PCI cards on a riser (PVR and DVB-T) with no problems. The data rates transferred over the bus are very small compared to its capacity, so I wouldn't expect to have any problems with just 2 cards. Nick _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
