* Joseph Tate ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [060327 12:51]: > I just bought a HD5000 air2pc HDTV Capture card > (http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=46), and thought I > would share my experiences with it: > Unless you have a very recent video card and a very fast CPU, video > playback sucks, whether live or recorded.
Yes, you need a fast CPU for "playback", but the HD5000 records HD perfectly fine. You just need lots and lots of storage. I have it in my Myth box (Athlon XP 2500+ / nvidia FX5200), and I record all sorts of stuff OTA. Depending on the quality of the HD source (720p/1080i/etc), I get mixed results when trying to playback on the same box. So, the card itself works just fine -- it tunes fast and does exactly what it's supposed to do. As well as HD/ATSC, it also supports QAM (for those cable channels that are not encrypted). > Before you jump on a HDTV capture card, play the clip at > http://pchdtv.com/downloads/tst.tar in mplayer or xine on your target > system. (Note that it's an mpeg stream, not a tar file as the url > implies). Agreed -- it's important to test your target system, but the video capturing is the easy part, you don't need much power at all to do that. Playback is the hard part -- which is why I love Myth's frontend/backend architecture, where you can have a "backend" server in the corner of your house capturing all the data, and then any frontend machine (TV room, laptop, etc) can "playback" the video. > I thought my Athlon XP 3000+ with 512MB ram and rinky-dink video card > (ATI 7500 and Nvidia GeForce 2) would be fine, but it chews all my CPU > and chops like crazy. I just bought a new GeForce 6200A with HDTV out > and it seems to be able to play that clip ok, but I haven't had a lot > of time to really play. My cpu usage still seems to be very very high > though. The nuts and bolts of it is: you need a really good mpeg > decoder to do decode hdtv signals in realtime. If you're really CPU-bound, and you have an Nvidia card, try XvMC. http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC Jason -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
