[mythtv-users] Capture card with best tuner - BT8x8, SA713x or PVR-250?

[Richard Lee-Morlang]

On Fri, 2003-08-22 at 22:33, Joe V wrote:

> My setup is an Athlon XP 2400+, 512MB of DDR RAM, and
> a Western Digital 100GB hard drive.  Clearly, this
> should be good enough for "Live TV".


Absolutely. I'm fairly confident I could throw another capture card in
my box, and be able to record two signals while watching something else
without any difficulty. 


> Given that setup, I'm not too keen on having any
> noticable disruptions in the picture.  By noticable, I
> mean, the picture pauses for 2-5 seconds, with no
> sound.


Wow. I have trouble imagining a cable signal so bad that it would cause
those sorts of problems on your hardware. Is there any chance your
recordings directory isn't on a DMA-enabled drive? Or do you happen to
have automatic commercial skipping turned on? 

Maybe you should stick a still image of a typical "marginal" picture up
somewhere. I've got a few channels that often look like every show was
filmed in a mild blizzard, and none of them are so bad as to cause those
sorts of problems.


> using the v4l2 drivers and bttv 0.9.x as well as the
> default bttv in Red Hat 9, and the latest bttv 0.7.x.


I'm running Redhat 9's default driver, I believe, which appears to be
0.7.96.


> I guess I'll have to hope that the management will fix
> the signal, and in the meantime, play around with it
> further.  Although my goal is to have everything in
> one box, I wonder if using a dedicated backend would
> help out.


Any chance that there's any local equipment that is interfering? When I
first setup myth, I noticed the picture was significantly worse than
with my TV or VCR tuners. After some experimentation I noticed that the
splitter I was using degraded the signal a bit (I'm assuming it was too
close to the computer and was picking up a lot of the EM noise), the
signal amplifier was adding even more noise (maybe for the same
reasons), and the hub I'd added was the worst contributor of all. 

Rick

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