[mythtvnz] Basic hardware help

[Steve Hodge]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 2:32 PM, matthew pearce <pearce.mg at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hauppauge 150/500. The 500 has two tuners allowing you to watch two
> channels at once. Will my puny little 1.2Ghz allow me to watch 1
> channel while recording another, or record two chanells while watching
> neither? If not then I will get a 150 which my hardware can use. Is
> this right?
>

Cards with hardware mpeg encoders, such as the Hauppauge cards, require very
little CPU to record. You should have no problems recording two channels and
watching something at the same time.


> If I got a 150/500 and then got a freeview card, could I watch most of
> the channels on freeview and get Prime of the 150/500?
>

Yes. You can assign a higher priority to the DVB card. That will mean that
it will record the channels on Freeview with that card and fall back to the
Hauppauge card when necessary (e.g. for Prime, or if you want to record
stuff on say One and 3 at the same time). With MythTV 0.21 DVB cards can
record multiple channels on the same multiplex. Freeview channels are
divided across two multiplexes: One, 2, One Sport Extra, TVNZ 6, and Maori
TV are on one (and presumably TVNZ 7 will also be), and 3, C4, Stratos,
Parliament TV, and Cue on the other. So you can record One and 2
simultaneously on the one DVB card, for example.


> Why are PCI graphics cards bad? what is XVMC?
>

XvMC is an extension to X that allows stuff to use the video card to assist
with mpeg decoding. This drastically reduces the CPU requirements for
playing back mpeg2 content. However it has it's disadvantages - it's
traditionally been problematic to set up and it imposes restrictions that
fully CPU based playback doesn't have (such as a black and white only OSD
with recent nVidia cards and limitations on what deinterlacers can be used).
More details can be found on the MythTV wiki:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC
.

Note that your CPU should be powerful enough to playback SD content without
XvMC, but not powerful enough for HD content even with XvMC. So I wouldn't
bother with it if I were you.

Cheers,
Steve
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