[mythtv-users] Tuner Card w/ Svideo Inputs & PCI Sound Transfer

Joseph A. Caputo jcaputo1 at comcast.net
Thu Jan 22 23:06:39 EST 2004


On Thursday 22 January 2004 21:48, Ian Neubert wrote:
> Joe Votour wrote:
> >Well, it doesn't have analog audio left/right, but the
> >Hauppauge WinTV card (model 401) supports S-Video in,
> >with a 3.5mm headphone jack input (stereo), and works
> >with btaudio (so no connection to a sound card is
> >necessary).
> 
> Thanks Joe. Do you have one of these cards? How's the video and audio
> quality?

Yes, I have a WinTV-radio (PCI 401 card).  My card does btaudio, though as I 
said that's no guarantee others will.  I'm happy enough with the A/V 
quality... I *almost* don't notice I'm not watching 'real' TV; I'm sure if I 
had enough CPU to crank up the resolution/bitrate, plus played around a bit 
more with the V4L and Xv picture settings, it'd be really good.  I don't have 
any basis for comparison to other cards, though I have 2 M-179s on the shelf 
that I'll be installing as soon as I get a machine to put them in.

> 
> Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
> >Also, I believe not all of the revisions of the WInTV-PCI 401 cards may
> >support btaudio.  I don't know if anyone has been able to reliably identify
> >cards that will support btaudio; certainly not without examining the chips
> on
> >the card, and even that is not always a guarantee.
> 
> Thanks for the tip. I'm leaning toward using a bunch of the newer PVR-250's
> as they don't need a sound card and they have an integrated encoder.
> 
> >4 analog tuners?  I hope the OP has an awful lot of spare CPU cycles...
> 
> Assuming I get the PVR-250's with onboard MPEG-2 encoders, do you think an
> Athlon 2400+ could handle all 4 + a pcHDTV recording at once? In this setup
> the CPU shouldn't be doing anything with the video for any of the cards,
> just spewing everything to the hard disks. Is that correct?

Just to clarify, PVR-250's are not 'analog' tuners. Here 'analog' describes 
the stream presented by the video device, so an 'analog' card captures raw 
video, whereas the PVR-x50s are 'hardware MPEG encoder' cards, meaning they 
provide an already-encoded MPEG stream.  I assume from your statement that 
when you said "4 analog tuners", you really meant 4 'standard' tuners (i.e., 
that capture an analog signal from the internal tuner or composite/S-Video).

If you have the money (~USD$100 each is a good price) and can find them, the 
'Freestyle' cards might be what you're looking for.  They are the OEM version 
of the PVR-250, but have no IR remote support and have L/R RCA jacks for 
audio in instead of the typical 1/8" stereo jack.

As to whether your machine would be able to handle 4 PVR-250s + 1 pcHDTV all 
recording at once, you are right in that the limiting factor would be disk 
throughput.  I suspect you might hit a bottleneck there... that's an awful 
lot of data to be writing at once.  Also, you need to leave some room for 
playback read access; even if your frontend(s) is/are on another machine(s), 
the stream still needs to be read from disk.  Time to do some disk 
access/throughput calculations!

-JAC



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