[mythtvnz] Freeview hardware advice sought

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:40:06 +1300 (NZDT), you wrote:

>Hi all,
>I have a Via EPIA SP13000 system with a Hauppauge PVR-150 running MythDora
>10.21 (a Fedora 10 based distro with Mythtv 0.21).  Mythtv is running as a
>backend and frontend on the box.  It works well with my current setup.
>I'm thinking about replacing the PVR-150 with a DVB board for Freeview.
>My question is what would the list members recommend?
>My EPIA system is low powered but the PVR-150 does its encoding in
>hardware so I would think a DVB board would need to do the same.
>I have no preference between satellite or terrestrial but I doubt my
>system would handle terrestrial HD.
>I would be interested to find out how much processing power is required
>for a DVB.
>Thanks in advance
>
>Kerry

There is no problem recording DVB-T as no encoding is required - you
just store what comes off the air into a file.  The problems are with
playback, for which you either need a 3.0+ GHz processor (and use all
of it for the playback of 1080i (TV3) and maybe still have problems),
or you need to use an Nvidia card that supports H.264 decoding in
hardware.  Unfortunately, the latter option is all alpha software at
the moment, so is only for someone who is confident in their Linux
skills and does not mind the occasional crash.  It does seem to be
rapidly getting to a point of being usable though.

I have not used DVB-S, but I understand it also needs no encoding for
recording, and playback is properly supported with quite old versions
of MythTV - 0.21 should have no problems, and if your system copes
with analogue TV, I can not see why it would have problems with DVB-S.
However, it is only standard definition TV.  To get high definition
TV, you need DVB-T, and I really recommend that - once you are used to
HDTV, you will not want to go back to SD.

If your PC could be retrofitted with an Nvidia card that supports
H.264 and has an HDMI output, I would think it would be capable of
DVB-T once the software settles down.  With the H.264 playback
offloaded onto the GPU, I see low main CPU usage on my Vista systems,
and the reports of the MythTV support are the same.  So the only
performance problem then would be just how many channels it could
record at once while still being able to play one program back at the
same time.  DVB-T channels ("multiplexes") carry more than one TV
program, so even with only one DVB-T tuner, you can record multiple
channels at once.