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<p>I was trying to use a Lifeview FlyVideo 3000 framegrabber that
has an SAA7134 chip, but the performance is unacceptable. Accordingly, I am in
the market for a new tuner card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding. A friend of mine
has recommended the widely-used Hauppage PVR-150, and the MythTV documentation
suggests that this will take a significant load off of my processor. I have also
been eyeing the PVR-500, as watching and recording at the same time might be
useful.</p></div></div></blockquote><div><br>A good choice. Anything with an onboard MPEG2 decoder will do the job. With my PVR-150, recording takes very little CPU time, as it's just a matter of reading from the card and dumping to the disk.
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<p><span>1.<span>
</span></span>Is there some way to configure MythTV to simply display
live TV without recording it (or to launch a tvtime-like application from within
the MythTV interface)? This way I could use the framegrabber I already have for
the sole purpose of viewing live TV, and use a PVR-150 for recording.</p></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Nope, other than hacks luck running an external program video MythVideo or something. It's just not the way myth was designed to work.
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<span>2.<span>
</span></span>If that won't work, and I get a PVR-500 (which is
a little expensive for me), would my hardware be able to keep up with two
MPEG-2 streams?</p></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Probably. The real question is one of I/O bottlenecks. On my setup, at one point I was forced to use UDMA2 (only had 40-pin cables), and having two recordings going while playing a third and doing a commercial flag run would sometimes result in I/O starvation. But even then, it was rather infrequent. Just make sure you minimize the number of commercial flagging jobs that can run at once, or disable automatic commercial flagging (it's a CPU-intensive process).
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<p><span>3.<span>
</span></span>Does anyone else have any experience with low-end boxes
like this? Is it a worthwhile endeavor, or is there a high likelihood I'll
be disappointed with the picture quality, performance, etc. (480x480 or so
would be nice, maybe even a little higher).</p></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Well, the bigger question is one of video playback. You'll almost certainly need a video card which supports XvMC, which hardware accelerates MPEG2 decoding, as well. At that point, I/O really is your biggest potential bottleneck.
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<span>4.<span>
</span></span>I'm trying not to hoard a lot of old TV shows,
but if I find myself wanting to move MythTV recordings to another computer for
archival (one that is NOT running MythTV – I have a Windows machine with
two 500 GB drives), will I be able to easily?</p></div></div></blockquote><div><br>And still have them available in Myth? Unless you're using the storage groups patch, that might be tough. If you're not interested in that, then the videos will play back just fine on Linux or Windows as-is using mplayer or vlc (or anything else that supports .nuv).
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<span>5.<span>
</span></span>I've heard rumors that new PVR-150s have a
different chip that will not work under Linux. Anyone know anything about this?</p></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Not that I've heard of (though, in the past, some retailers have sent a different board, even though they ordered the PVR-150). Newer PVR-500s are problematic, though (the Samsung chip appears to be rather finnicky).
<br><br>Brett.</div></div><br>