[PLUG] MythTV on the small and cheap.

[Daniel Logghe]

Jeme A Brelin wrote:


> 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?

Typically they can do output to a monitor using a pass-through. 
Different cards may very though.

> 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?

No, there are not hardware decoders that will do divx yet, divx is quite 
a bit different encoding and there is currently no standard so there are 
half a dozen slightly different codecs out there, divx, xvid, the ogg 
one, etc.. They may eventually be standardized under mpeg4, but until 
then it's unlikely there will be much hardware support for them.

Pretty much all the decoder/encoder cards will handle mpeg 1 and 2. DVDs 
are mpeg2, so any of them should be able to handle dvd decoding properly.

You can still use a slow pc with a decoder card and play divx stuff if 
you have a fast pc on your network. You can play it off the fast one and 
translate into mpeg1 or 2 streaming over the network. VLC works quite 
well for that. Or just reencode them before playing them.