[mythtvnz] A few MythTV questions

[Nick Rout]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 9:13 PM, Aaron Whitehouse
<lists at whitehouse.org.nz> wrote:
> 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.

What hardware h.264 acceleration? There is no such thing in linux. For
reasons why not, go ask nVidia.

> 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?
>

depends if you want to get HD or not. If you are happy with SD your
machine is fine, and you will need a satellite dish. If you want HD
you need DVB-T and a very grunty machine as well as the latest patches
from Paul Kendall (see other threads).

> 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?

Mine has always worked fine.

>Most guides that I have
> found are quite old.  I assume that the S/PDIF carries a digital signal
> encoded in AC3 or PCM.

by definition I think spdif must be 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?
>

I think myth does it all in software, it passes ac3 and pcm streams
through. other codecs it presumably converts to pcm (as it would have
to do for analogue output anyway). Most decent digital input
amplifiers will mix sound so it comes out all speakers.

> 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.
>

In ChCh I use Ascot Electronics http://www.ascot.net.nz/ . In fact
they are coming to install at my new place today.

I bought a dish from here: http://www.freeviewshop.co.nz/