Hardware recommendations for MythTV/FreeBSD

[Drew Tomlinson]

On 2/2/2005 10:34 AM Michael Johnson wrote:

> On Feb 2, 2005, at 1:27 PM, Drew Tomlinson wrote:
>
>
>
>> On 2/2/2005 5:59 AM Adam Maloney wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Steven S. wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> For the most part the pvr-250 is plug and play. Most of the tuners 
>>>> are supported so you should be okay. I've not fiddled with source 
>>>> selection, from what I gather from reply's here it seems to be hit 
>>>> or miss, oddly. I would guess it would work. Unless it doesnt.
>>>
>>> That's kind of what I suspected...everyone is pretty sure it will 
>>> work fine, but no one wants to out-right guaranty it :) But unless I 
>>> hear any real negative feedback from others, I think my mind is made 
>>> up on the PVR-250.
>>
>> I've been watching this thread as I am interested in building such a 
>> setup also. Can anyone comment on whether the 350 offers any benefit 
>> over the 250? As I understand it, the 350 also includes a hardware 
>> decoder for MPEG-2 playback. Is this any significant advantage? My 
>> PVR will be based on an 1gz AMD Athlon.
>
> That is the only advantage the 350 has over the 250, hardware MPEG-2 
> decoder.
> It doesn't take much CPU power to decode MPEG-2.
>
>> Also, I have a wide screen HDTV. Does anyone know of any cards that 
>> support the wide screen HDTV resolutions? Although I've found tuner 
>> cards (no hardware encoder) that support this, I haven't come across 
>> any PVR cards.
>
> There is only a handful that mytvtv supports, and there is no freebsd 
> driver (yet)
> http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1 , scroll down the the 
> HDTV part.
> If you get one of those cards you will need to get it before July 1st 
> if you are in the USA.
> After July 1 they will be illegal to sell until they respect the HD 
> broadcast flag.

Thanks for the reply.  I reviewed the pcHDTV 3000 and the Air2PC cards.  
Any recommendations of one over the other?  Seems like these would be 
good additions for my system for capturing or time-shifting HDTV over 
the air broadcasts.  However a PVR-250 is still needed for the day to 
day work of capturing or time shifting my satellite reception.  Does 
this make sense and can I run both cards?  If so, I'll build with the 
PVR-250 first and then add the HDTV later (while keeping my eye on the 
July 1 deadline).  :)

Thanks,

Drew

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