I ended up using the PIII exclusively as a backend, though, and using a PII 450Mhz as a front end. With that setup I was able to record and playback 640x480 RTJPEG.
That said, the picture quality with the bt878 card was crap. I recently purchased a PVR-150 and was delighted with the picture quality during the 3 hours that it actually worked. The downside, of course, is that I haven't been able to get it to work reliably.
So, my advice, depending on cash/time at hand would be:
ample cash/no time: Get a PVR-350, easily the most supported card in the MythTV community.
ample time/short cash: Get a PVR-150 and figure out how to get it working.
little time or cash: Find an old sub $100 computer on eBAy or your local classifieds to use as a frontend.
just plain broke: Record at 320x240 and pretend you have the world's biggest iPod.
On 11/2/05, Michael T. Dean <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 11/02/05 18:32, Todd Houle wrote:
> I have been raving about MythTV to a friend of mine who finally
> decided to try it himself. He had an old PC (1GHz Dell GX150) and 2
> old tuner cards (avermedia and hauppauge win-Tv). I don't know the
> details of the cards other than they both use the bt878 chips.
>
> We installed KnoppMyth as that is what he heard about elsewhere.
> KnoppMyth detected everything perfectly and ran great. I added the
> cards in Myth-setup, but we couldn't use it happily. There was a 1
> second pause, for every second of live tv... I guess these cards
> don't have hardware MPEG encoders on them and the computer couldn't
> handle the load.. I lowered the quality way down, but still couldn't
> get a smooth playback..
>
> I told him to get a better computer, or a TV card that supports
> hardware encoding. Was I right? or was there something else I could
> have done?
Yep. Although you might be able to make something work with RTJPEG (at
least for a single tuner), it's not worth the effort and the
compromises, IMHO. And make sure he has Xv support for the video card
(probably won't be an issue with a newer system, but might be with the
old one).
Mike
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