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

[David Brodbeck]

Rod Smith wrote:
> 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.)

As a point of reference, I found a 2.0 GHz Celeron could just barely
record and play back at the same time using a frame grabber.  It
couldn't really do anything else at the same time, though.

I elected to go with a hardware MPEG2 card for two reasons:
- My target FE/BE system was a 1 GHz Nehemiah, and it was clear it
wasn't going to be able to handle software encoding.
- I didn't want other processes using the CPU to interfere with encoding.

I've never regretted spending the extra bucks on a hardware encoder.  My
secondary backend does use a frame grabber, but it's a 3 GHz P4 desktop
that's only occasionally called upon to record when there are scheduling
conflicts.  It can software encode an MPEG4 stream and play it back
simultaneously with about 50% CPU usage, but loading up the CPU too
heavily with other processes will cause stuttering.  I had to disable
SUSE's Zen automatic updater, for example, because it was messing up my
recordings.  The overall video quality on the hardware MPEG2 card also
seems better than on the frame grabber, but that may be luck of the draw.