[PLUG] MythTV on the small and cheap.

[Sasha Romanosky]

I'm not an expert on all the codecs and what they can and cannot do. 

However, a P3/450 with a card that does mpeg encoding should be fine.
The key there, of course, is the card that does the encoding for you.
The hauppauge 250 cards seem to be the most popular. They're $150 at
fry's last time I checked. 

Join and read the mythtv lists, you'll find lots of (and probably too
much) information.

Mythtv has many modules, including one that can play DVDs. Actually, all
it really does is launch a real player (like mplayer) with command line
options. Nevertheless, having those modules integrated to mythtv results
in a single application that does it all. 

Good luck, 

sasha

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-admin at lists.pdxlinux.org 
> [mailto:plug-admin at lists.pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Jeme A Brelin
> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 5:50 PM
> To: PLUG
> Subject: [PLUG] MythTV on the small and cheap.
> 
> 
> 
> OK, so I'm looking at TV stuff (half dreaming, half seriously).
> 
> I don't watch TV.  I don't have cable and I don't expect to 
> ever need multiple simultaneous television inputs.
> 
> I've been using my PC and its TVOut stuff to feed my 
> television DVD and DiVX ;-) videos for quite some time.  But 
> now the TV is kind of dying and I'm seriously considering 
> just using a big old monitor instead of a television.  The 
> only trick is the VCR.  I still want access to the tapes. So 
> I will need TV-in so I can watch VHS on the computer (as well 
> as digitize analog input, which is cool).
> 
> I'm looking at the hardware options (including the MythTV hardware
> database) and I'm coming to see that perhaps the most 
> expensive choice is the cheapest!  That is to say, it seems 
> like the best price/performance point is buying a high-end TV 
> card that will do hardware encoding AND decoding so that the 
> PC itself can be relatively low powered.
> 
> Does anyone here know much about the hardware decoder cards?  
> Do they only do output to TV or can the decoded video go to 
> your regular graphics adapter?
> 
> Does it make sense?  Cheap PC with good encoder/decoder card? 
>  I figure you can do the whole thing for well under $400 from 
> scratch.  I happen to have a PIII-450 sitting idle in my 
> living room that would seem perfect with the right card (the 
> playback right now is choppy).
> 
> Is there a hardware decoder that will do DiVX and DVD as 
> well?  Or is that all of a piece and I'm drawing artificial 
> distinctions?
> 
> Lots of questions... still reading.
> 
> J.
> -- 
>    -----------------
>      Jeme A Brelin
>     jeme at brelin.net
>    -----------------
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