[mythtv-users] Moving to HD

[Matt White]

On 10-04-22 4:57 PM, Thom Paine wrote:
> I just picked up an HD tv, and have upgraded my Bell satellite to HD
> as well. I have just powered off my myth system as I bought a hard
> drive for the satellite to make it into a PVR.
>
> I've been using it for about a week and it's a complete pos. I guess I
> am spoiled by how awesome myth is.
>
> I have a backend in the basement where my noise is kept out of sight,
> and I have a small frontend upstairs on my main tv which is low power
> and quiet.
>
> Specs on the BE is a 2.8GHz P4 with 1G of ram, and about 2TB of hard
> drive space lvm'd over a few drives.
>
> Specs on the FE is an AMD 3GHz with 1G ram, 80G laptop drive, nVidia FX5200.
>
> My capture card in the BE is a Happauge 350. I realize I'll need to
> replace this to move to HD.
>
> With only picking up an HD card for the BE, would I be able to move to
> HD on my system and have it work ok?
>
> I will move my satellite to the basement, and just have myth control
> it and manage recordings, and then only watch recorded shows on my FE
> which is on my 40" Sony Bravia.
>
> Will the FE drive my TV at 1920x1080? Do I need to pick up a new video
> card for that as well? The one main reason I'd like to keep the FX5200
> is because it's fanless and I like how quiet my FE is.
>
> It's time to overhaul my myth setup so I'm planning on wiping
> everything and starting new on CentOS back and front.

Hi, Thom - this is very close to my system.  I originally had an SD 
receiver hooked up to a PVR-150.  Last year, I picked up a single tuner 
Bell HD receiver and an HD-PVR.  I'm feeding the component output of the 
receiver into the HD-PVR, and I'm still changing channels with the 
PVR-150s ir blaster - I kept the SD receiver, and it picks up lower 
priority recordings when there is a conflict.  If you do that, make sure 
you change the remote address on one of them!

As others have said, your frontend system will need an upgrade of the 
video card.  Alternatively, pick up an ION-based system like a Revo or a 
Zotac motherboard.  I'm running a Zotac board (netbooted from the 
server, so no HD) for my frontend, and they work beautifully.  However, 
grabbing a relatively new NVidia card for your existing box will work 
just fine.

A couple of things to note - you'll want to set your HD receiver to be 
fixed at a certain resolution.  It's in the setup menus...I have mine 
fixed to 720p, since I don't think Bell puts much out at 1080, and I 
didn't notice any difference in quality.

The other thing is that the receiver wants to be able to do a download 
every night (I think the default was 3 AM).  I initially tried turning 
that off completely, but found that the receiver was unstable (locking 
up every couple of days).  I finally turned it back on (moved up to 4 
AM, since I don't have anything that records around then), and set up a 
cron job that fires a "SELECT" code through the IR blaster about quarter 
after 4 to wake it back up.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet, but you'll also have to move 
to Mythtv 0.23 to be able to use the HD-PVR and VDPAU (there are 
alternatives, but 0.23 is the best option IMO).  It's been remarkably 
stable for me.

-- 
Matt White
whitem at arts.usask.ca
University of Saskatchewan