[mythtv-users] Mechanical cable splitter

Rod Smith mythtv at rodsbooks.com
Fri Nov 16 17:57:24 UTC 2007


On Friday 16 November 2007 11:37:11 Brian Wood wrote:
> Josh White wrote:
> > I've read that there is a way to set a PVR-250 to write to the screen
> > "instantly" by skipping the encoding on the card and using it like a
> > basic frame grabber.
>
> But if you skip the encoding, and make it work like a frame grabber,
> then you either have to store the uncompressed video, or have your CPU
> do the encoding. In either case you are not helping the situation.
>
> If you really want "instant response" you do not want a PVR, you want a
> TV set. You can accomplish this by simply connecting the source to the
> TV set's video input directly.

For the most part you're right; however, I can think of one reason you might 
want to have a separate mode for non-buffering, straight-through encoding: If 
you hook up an external device (video game console, VCR, etc.) and want to 
use it on a monitor rather than a TV. This might be desirable if you want to 
use a computer monitor rather than a traditional HDTV set as a monitor for an 
HDTV configuration. For use with MythTV, this would be fine, but to hook up 
other devices, you'd then need some way to feed the signal to the monitor, 
and most computer monitors aren't set up to accept coaxial RF, S-video, 
composite, or other common TV signals. In principle, you could exit from 
MythTV and use tvtime or some such to do the job, but that's a bit of a 
nuisance. (Or could the MythTV menus be customized to launch such a program 
from a menu item?)

All that said, I'm not sure how beneficial it would be to use a monitor as a 
TV. I'm not quite ready to buy an HDTV set, so I've only been paying very 
casual attention to standards and prices. My impression is that computer 
monitors of a given size are about as expensive as HDTVs of the same size. I 
have no idea if there'd be any benefit in terms of the connector types or 
video card support.

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


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