[mythtv-users] mythtv-users Digest, Vol 80, Issue 26

Richard Evans rp.evans at tiscali.co.uk
Fri Nov 6 01:31:50 UTC 2009


I'm not quite sure how to go about replying to messages on this mailing, but here goes my 1st attempt.

> Would I be correct in assuming that I could use some sort of DVB-T tuner 
> card, or even a DVB-T2, instead of analogue capture cards. This should 
> allow it to receive and record digital TV without any need to actually 
> encode any video, as the digital TV transmission are obviously already 
> encoded.


Yes I do exactly that, in the UK. I use two Hauppauge Nova-T USB2 tuners which are fully supported in Linux. No special configuration necessary. 

I'm not aware of any current DVB-2 tuners but I'm sure that as soon as they become available, one of the many clever people out there will get to work writing drivers. 

Mark
.......
Thanks Mark, this sounds encouraging.

Since it is possible to use USB digital tuners, I'm now seriously wondering whether I could use my existing music server for the back end (to avoid having an additional server burning power all day). It can't take expansion cards, but it does have 4 USB ports on the back.

My existing music server is a Tranquil PC (fanless) with a dual core 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor, 1Gb RAM & 1Tb HDD. (About 500 Gb of hard drive space still available). It currently runs Vortexbox (which is an easy way to set up a SqueezeCenter music server). As far as I'm aware this all runs on top of Fedora version 11. So it might just be a matter of figuring out how to get Fedora to run MythTv at the same time. I could probably get some help with that from the VortexBox forums. I'm also assuming that the back end won't take up a huge amount of the processing power, as it's mostly just taking in data from the tuners and writing it to the hard drive.

As for a front end it might also be worth trying to use the same machine, at least as an experimental setup. It seems to have audio and video outputs built in, assuming I can find drivers for them. If it doesn't cope with the load, I could always find an alternative front end later.

I'm not sure where I'm going to find the time to do all this, I'm still in the early stages of researching all this, but any pointers on how to go about the above setup would be useful.

Thanks.

Richard.




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