[mythtv-users] HD Homerun questions

[Mark Knecht]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> On Monday 12 January 2009 08:42:17 Mark Knecht wrote:
>> I was thinking about getting one to start playing with. I know little
>> about HD so far but I figured this could be a way to start learning. A
>> couple of questions:
>>
>> 1) Does the HD Homerun actually handle 1080p or are you limited to 1080i?
>
> It only receives ATSC and QAM, it's unlikely you will find much 1080p material
> transmitted in that format.
>
>>
>> 2) How much backend CPU power is required to use this device? My
>> server is underpowered on the CPU side but does close to 60GB/S on the
>> hard drives. Will this be OK?
>
> No power is needed to encode the signal, since ATSC and QAM are both already
> encoded streams and need only to be written to disk. 60GB/sec. should be more
> than adequate. The CPU (or GPU these days) power is needed to decode and play
> the stream.

My current server is a very old Compaq that uses an AMD Sempron 3200+.
(Essentially a Celeraon) It has only 512MB SHARED memory so it only
has about 384MB for Linux. It runs mythbackend and cupsd. I suspect
that asking it in addition to become a frontend is just not going to
work, and most especially if the reason for doing this is to play 480p
HD material. Being that it's underpowered I likely don't want to buy
memory but I don't have the time or money to mess with a completely
new backend purchase right now.

I do have an older PPC Mac Mini here with Gentoo on it. It hasn't been
turned on in 6 months. I wonder how it might do as an HD server with a
good external drive?

>
>>
>>    I need to do some thinking about my frontend devices. Currently I
>> use a couple of underpowered Pundit-R boxes for our regular TVs but a
>> lot of our watching gets done on PC screens. Will I need to do a lot
>> of transcoding? One TV is 480p capable and is near the server. Could
>> the server become a front end and play 480p directly? What sort of
>> video card would be required for component output? Is there one? The
>> other is an old Sony SDTV. What do I do there? Any ideas are welcomed.
>
> You can certainly have a single machine run a backend and a frontend. This is
> probably one of the most-used configurations. Component out video cards are
> not common, but any card that is supported by the underlying Linux system
> should be OK. You may want one capable of XvMC if your CPU is marginal.

I'll check that out. How does one determine XvMC support before a
purchase? Or does this mean something like 'new nVidia'?

>
> Did you maybe mean "composite" and not "component"? It's unfortunate those two
> terms are so similar.

I meant component. It's an older Mitsubishi 480p HD set with component
inputs only.

This is a stop gap until I buy a newer set something later this year.
That set will likely be 1080p HDMI but for now I was just thinking of
getting the HDHR and playing with it.

Thanks,
Mark