[mythtv-users] Firewire vs HD-PVR

[Christopher Meredith]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Ronald Frazier <ron at ronfrazier.net> wrote:
>> Just wondering what people are doing if they have a working Firewire
>> box and a HD-PVR.  They will need to be setup in a recording group
>> since they share the same source, but I am wondering if people always
>> use the HD-PVR once they have it in place, or if they use Firewire
>> when it works and then HD-PVR for channels that don't work through
>> Firewire.
>
> Although I don't have a HD-PVR, I have been contemplating getting one,
> and my thinking was that it would better just to put everything
> through the HD-PVR. It would simplify the configuration, it's not as
> if the HD-PVR would have something else it could do if you freed it
> up, the compression should be good enough that I wouldn't expect to
> see any artifacts from the recompression, and you'd end up with
> smaller files since the HD-PVR does h264 (which should be compressed
> smaller than the MPEG-2 you'd receive through firewire).

I have working firewire setup but I run everything through the HD-PVR
now that I have one. I had always had a problem watching Live TV over
firewire (though recordings worked fine) plus the HD-PV keeps the
recording file size down. I can use avidemux2 on the HD-PVR recordings
to chop out commercials almost immediately without reencoding, giving
a good file size. Encoding MPEG-2 to h264 usually took 12+ hours.

The downside is that the HD-PVR occasionally chokes and I lose a few
seconds here and there.