On Sunday 13 November 2005 13:26, Joseph Wilkicki wrote: > Hi all! > > I've finally got the budget to move on to the next phase of my MythTV plan. > At this point, I have an Opteron 146 with 1GB of RAM and a 1 TB RAID array > for my backend. My next steps are: putting in Tuner cards and creating a > frontend. At this point, I have non-digital cable, since that seems to be > the easiest to record without a fancy setup (IR blaster, firewire, etc). > Eventually, I think I would like to move to digital cable with HD. So my > first question is: should I be looking at a PVR-250 to start with or bump > up to a pchdtv3000? Any thoughts on the Air2PC HD card? I know I don't need > the PVR-350, since the backend will be headless.
You'll probably want one HDTV tuner for the OTA HD channels (Even if you actually pick them up via the cable line). I got a HD-3000 card and find it is better at receiving the HD channels than my cablebox over firewire, i think cause the cablebox has an inferior tuner... its just too finicky compared to the 3000... Most people here seem to think the PVR-150 has better quality than the 250. Tther than that I don't really know the difference. I got the 150, it was cheap, and has a FM tuner. As for the digital cable box, depending on what you get, you might be able to use firewire, you might be able to receive a bunch of stations over firewire, none, or a limited number (due to the 5C "encryption"). I have a DCT-6200 but since I get very few channels via firewire I'm connecting it to my PVR150(no perceptable video quality loss for non-HD channels as well!) and *trying* to use firewire to change the channels (works from my laptop, not from my new myth computer...). Steve > > For the frontend, I'm a little more confused. My plan is to rip a large > portion of my DVD library to the RAID array. I want MPEG4 with AC3 audio as > the encoding format. I want to display it with component video cables on my > widescreen. I also want to be able to display HD eventually. I see two > basic routes. The first is to go with the new EPIA with the on-board MPEG2 > decoder and MPEG4 accelerator, but I'm not sure if it does component out. > It would be quiet and small though. > > The other option is: use a NVidia card with native component out support, > and a Micro-ATX footprint. If I go that route, what do people recommend for > processor and memory requirements for possible HD decoding, given that the > NVidia card will probably accelerate this? Is it worth it to put another > tuner card in the frontend for channel surfing? What about system and fan > noise? Can anyone recommend parts that are quiet? I'm especially concerned > about a decent case. I'm also going to be using 802.11G between the backend > and frontend, due to physical restrictions. Any thoughts on video over > wireless, especially MPEG2 and MPEG4? There is no wife factor, but a > borged-looking entertainment center will probably drive any potential > wife-factors away. :-) > > I know it is a lot of questions; any thoughts on any part of the above > would be useful. I've been researching this off and on for about three > years, and my head is full of trade-offs at this point. Maybe someone can > talk about how they got started and what the upgrade path looked like. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
