[mythtv-users] completely new and have questions before I buy hardware

[Fred Squires]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 5:26 PM, Quenten Griffith <qgriffith22 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am looking to setup my first mythtv box and have zero experience with
> tvtuners and the different types of broadcast signals.  I have a few quick
> questions that may be easy to answer for some of you experts.
>
> I live in the US and analog is going to go away in 2009.  I was going to
> purchase a PVR-350 card, however you can't find it any where since it is
> analog.  If I find this card, and just hook it up to coax (not the
> Timewarner box), will it still work after February 2009?  If I get a digital
> based card (does anyone have recommendations that play well with Linux) will
> it work hooked to coax and not going through a cable box?  The CPU I plan on
> using is rather old it is a Athelon 64bit 3200, so I was looking for a card
> with the decoder/encoder built on the tvtuner card, however it appears only
> analog cards come with this feature, do the digital cards not need this?

First of all do NOT buy a PVR-350, your cpu will easily play back SDTV
without a problem.
I have an Athlon 2500+ (that's a 32bit single core processor), which
easily plays back all my recordings from my PVR 150 and 250 and
outputs to my TV with a geforce 6200.  Also, I'm recording over the
air HD with an HDHomerun and my system plays it back just fine with
XvMC.
You'll probably have trouble if you try to play recordings from the
HD-PVR with that CPU though.

About the cable input, it should work after Feb 2009, but there are no
guarantees, it all depends on what your cable company decides to do.

-- 
It was supposed to be so Easy.