[mythtv-users] Backend setup for win-hvr-950Q
Raymond Wagner
raymond at wagnerrp.com
Sat Jul 30 04:51:45 UTC 2011
On 7/29/2011 23:33, Barry Fawthrop wrote:
> tvtime works right out of the box (so to speak)
TVTime only works with analog framegrabbers. Your card is an analog
framegrabber and digital tuner in one. While MythTV can handle V4L
framegrabbers, as far as most of us around here are concerned, they are
to be avoided at all costs.
Framegrabbers do just what it sounds like. They capture raw frames, and
store them temporarily in a location in memory. TVTime then takes that
frame, and copies it into your display buffer, and that's it. It leaves
audio passthrough up to the user. That is what framegrabbers were
designed to do, and in that scenario, they are cheap, effective, and
work well.
Now we come to MythTV, and being a DVR, MythTV records everything.
Instead of simply shifting some memory around, MythTV has to capture all
that data, store it in some longer term buffer, encode it in real time
to some compressed format, grab the audio either out of the tuner or
through a separate sound card, encode it, and multiplex the two together
while maintaining A/V sync. There are a ton of pitfalls in this
process, and are a never ending source of trouble to both the users and
the developers.
What I have been directing you to configure is the digital side of that
tuner, and if you just use that side and ignore the analog 'support'
entirely, it will work great. Cable providers will rebroadcast the
local stations unencrypted in a manner that card can record. They may
offer more unencrypted, but that varies from region to region. Silicon
Dust offers a database of expected clear QAM channel lineups,
search-able by zip code.
http://www.silicondust.com/support/channels/
If you want to record analog cable, you should use a hardware encoder.
A hardware encoder does all that messy stuff described above in
hardware, and offers MythTV a nice clean MPEG2 stream. They are a bit
more expensive, but what you pay in cost, you more than recover in ease
of use.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Analog_Hardware_Encoder_Cards
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