[mythtvnz] A few MythTV questions

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Hello all,

I have been trying to figure out a few things and I was hoping that
people on this list could help me:

1. I am running Myth on a 2.4 GHz P4 with an nVidia GeForce 4 Ti. I am
keen to set up Freeview on my machine (sound on the analogue and the
lack of a proper aspect ratio definition are pretty annoying), but have
been waiting to see what happens with the hardware-accelerated H.264
decoding. It recently occurred to me that my machine may not be powerful
enough, even if everything was fully accelerated. I could upgrade the
graphics to anything else AGP. Am I likely to be able to play H.264 on
this machine if everything goes well, or should I just settle on MPEG-2?

2. Has anyone got 5.1 sound working? Is the way that people are doing
this using S/PDIF over coax/optical? How well does the S/PDIF
pass-through work with recent distributions? Most guides that I have
found are quite old.  I assume that the S/PDIF carries a digital signal
encoded in AC3 or PCM. Is there some negotiation between the card and
the computer that lets the computer figure out which formats it can
pass-through and which have to be re-encoded into formats that the
stereo etc. can support? Do you set all of that manually?

3. Does anyone know of anyone that does cheap, but decent, Freeview
satellite installations? Surely some student or something is doing it
for some extra cash? The best that I have found so far is someone who
will install your satellite for $150 - then I could get one of TradeMe
for ~$100.

Thanks in advance,

Aaron