[mythtv-users] using mythtv

R. G. Newbury newbury at mandamus.org
Tue Jul 18 22:44:24 UTC 2006


Tony H wrote:
> Wow...some great responses here....from the look of it I would love to 
> use mythtv. I have just moved into an apartment while I build a house so 
> right now all I have set up is 1 PC, and 2 TVs. The PC is in the room 
> with a regular (non-HD) tv. I would imagine, that in order to do this 
> right, I would have to have two computers set up (one for each TV). The 
> primary reason for that being the fact that I am not supposed to drill 
> through the walls to run cable. I am debating putting single gang boxes 
> in and just covering them with blank faceplates when I move (I doubt 
> anyone would be the wiser) but that is another story. So what I would 
> have to do I imagine would be to have another mythtv box with a wireless 
> NIC to communicate back to the server (with the storage). Does this 
> sound about right? I want to try and figure out exactly what hardware I 
> will need to buy and how I will need to configure everything so I can 
> weigh all the options before starting.

When I started on the mythtv track, a year ago, I tried knoppmyth and 
other dedicated distros and had problems. I went to Fedora and followed 
Jarod Wilson's guide.... easy!...Well not too easy, but since you 
already use Fedora you will be well ahead of where I was with Linux. My 
major problem was ivtv for the PVR500 having hissy-fits with the dvb 
modules for the pcHDTV HD3000 card. All THAT went away with kernel 
2.6.15 when the two sides got their acts together. Now it is really 
quite easy to install and set up.

What you need depends upon what you have and want to get. If you are 
looking at cable feed only, then for SD television, the PVR500 is great. 
  If you want to grab a digital cable feed then the HD3000 (and its 
successor the HD5500) will decrypt QAM256 digital cable signals. Note 
that those are SD level signals... 720x480 basically.

For that level, you need a case with an ir receiver and a remote. All 
tuning is internal done on the cards by mythtv.

If you get digital cable HD then you will need to deal with getting the 
signal out of the cable-co-supplied set top box. The usual route appears 
to be firewire. Then the difficulty becomes changing the channels on the 
settop box. For that you need either an IR blaster, or a serial port on 
the STB.

If you get off the air HD from an antenna, the HD3000 or HD5500 cards 
will do fine. If your reception is good this is an easy setup according 
to lots of posters to this list. I haven't seen any mention of it, but I 
presume that you can drive a PVR500 card from an antenna and get all of 
the analog channels too... just not as clean as from a cable feed.

If you are going for HD, then the frontend video card is important. A 
backend just streams the data to the frontend. The video card and its 
output are the problem area. For example, although the VIA Epia 
motherboards are great, only the latest EN series will actually output 
an HD level signal to TV-OUT. They will do HD out the VGA port, but not 
out the S-video port. The limitation is the chipset AND the output 
method. S-video inherently will not do full HD. You need composite ( 3 
plugs) or HDMI. The latest EN series will output HD according to the 
specs. (This is presuming that your TV can actually do full HD and those 
are rather rare still). Similarly, the nvidia card of choice is the now 
quite old 5200 or 6200 series, because they were the last which did not 
require fan cooling.

If you are just going to use your present TV for the foreseable future, 
then your HD will be downsampled for display anyway so your choices can 
be made accordingly.

I am using a 1983 built 26" Sony Trinitron and an EPIA SP13000 
motherboard in a small and quiet case, for front and backend. Works fine 
for me.

Although some report good results using wireless, if I were you, I would 
just, as you say, put in some boxes in the wall, back to back and leave 
them plated over when you leave. Even if someone noticed there would be 
nothing to complain about.

Geoff






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