[mythtv-users] TV tuner cards - low cost recommendations?

[Rod Smith]

On Saturday 24 February 2007 06:06, Graeme Nelson wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Thanks for the responses so far.  It is the sort of info I wanted, even
> if not what I hoped to hear! :-/
>
> > What spec system are you planning to use for your PVR experiment?
>
> AMD Duron 1.3GHz with 768MB RAM for initial config/experimentation,
> moving later to at least Sempron 3000+ or Athlon64 3200+ with 1GB RAM
> for "production" system.

Your initial system will almost certainly be fast enough to handle a single 
frame grabber (software-encoding) card, although it might struggle to keep up 
with simultaneous recording and playback, and I doubt if it could handle two 
cards at once. (Somebody with more experience with hardware in that range may 
be better able to comment than I.) Your later "production" system will 
definitely be able to handle a single encoding card and simultaneous playback 
from it. (I've got a Celeron 3.06GHz and it works fine with such a 
configuration.) I recently tried two software encoding cards in my system and 
it struggled to keep up. I haven't debugged the issue -- for unrelated 
reasons I decided to move the second card to a different system on my home 
network. I would expect it to have worked better, though, given the CPU needs 
of the first card alone.

Of course, if you go with a frame grabber, you should take care not to run any 
CPU-intensive tasks (kernel compiles, say) when the system is recording, 
particularly before you switch from your slower to your faster system.

If you want dual tuners, you could compromise and get one frame grabber and 
one hardware-encoding card. That'll minimize the initial "bite" of the 
hardware-encoding card's cost and give you most of the benefits -- you can 
configure MythTV to favor the hardware-encoding card, using the 
software-encoding card only when the hardware-encoding card is in use.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com