[mythtv-users] Myth vs. Sage vs. Beyond

[Brian Wood]

On Nov 4, 2006, at 12:51 PM, Ed Gatzke wrote:

>
> That is also what I expected.  You can't do as much in those units,  
> at least not in a nice integrated package.  Myth is like 90% of  
> where I need it to be for the wife to accept it (she wants PIP??)

Myth does PiP, quite well in fact.

>
> My HD card looks great in Myth, the SD 500 card is a turd even with  
> the driver fixes.  And I don't have lots of slots to use.   Maybe I  
> send back my 500 and trade out to two 150s?  I assume they don't  
> have the same crap quality of the 500 right now.  But apparently  
> the 500 is a software problem, so I can't even really justify a  
> return.  Why did they have to screw us by change the hardware?   
> Idiots.
>

I wouldn't say "Idiots" just typical American businessmen. I suspect  
they don't really even do the development but contract that out to  
some outfit in Taiwan/China. Outfits like that use whatever tuner  
modules are the cheapest or most easily available, counting on simply  
changing the Windows drivers to make them compatible with the  
applications that they promise will work.

It may well be the case that the tuner modules used in earlier  
versions of the cards are not even available any longer.

Unfortunately the Linux market is not of great interest to them.  
Their (quite possibly wrong) perception is that it is not a large  
enough market segment to matter to them. The IVTV folks do a good job  
under the circumstances, but they have a never-ending thankless task.

Hauppauge might well want to release the specs needed to write a good  
driver, but they probably don't own the rights to allow them to do  
so, and the folks that do won't release the information because  
obviously you might use that information to spend thousands of $$$s  
to build your own board when you could buy one for $99 :-)

So I don't blame Hogpaws, except in the general sense that American  
manufacturers have sold their souls in the pursuit of a lower price,  
but they might well be out of business if they had not done so.

My older PVR-150s look great. I have one newer unit with a newer  
tuner so I use that with the baseband input from a sat receiver.

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