[PLUG] Want to build a Linux based PVR...

Erik Lane eriklane at gmail.com
Sat Feb 6 06:41:37 UTC 2010


>
> It isn't the playback that consumes the CPU it is recording analog to disk.
> It has to encode it to MPEG2 before it sticks it on the disk.

This is simply wrong. There is no requirement to compress the video to
MPEG of any variety before recording to disk. Both of my old analog
cards would just dump the whole stream to the disk quite happily. It
took a huge amount of space(30-100GB), but that wasn't a problem, as
my intention with the card was live TV and converting VHS tapes to
DVD, so I only needed to have one or two things stored on the disk at
a time. I would then compress the video as a second step as well as
run it through filters to clean it up and deinterlace, etc. I used a
300MHz pentium 2 or 3 to do this.

Although according to this page, a 450MHz should be able to handle
compressing analog into MPEG2 live.
http://ati.amd.com/products/faqs/allinwonderfaq.html
(See answer to question #5)

I was very happy with my ATI card, and also with my old Hauppauge.
Both of those could be had for cheap these days. They wouldn't handle
digital TV at all, but could do the input from your playstation
without breaking a sweat. In fact if you're not saving the video but
just viewing it my experience is that it doesn't take much CPU power
at all. The ATI, since it's also the system's video card, didn't
hardly touch the rest of the system if you were just watching video
full screen. The Hauppauge WinTV-Go that I had also had needed
extremely low system resources. (well, I still have it, just not in my
computer hooked to the cable, and I'm still happy with it.) I think it
used DMA or something like that to dump the stream directly to the
video card. In fact looking at the specs, they recommend a 90MHz
minimum. That's ridiculously low power compared to anything remotely
modern.

http://registration.hauppauge.com/webstore/specialofferforintelintegrators.asp

So there are options. Again, Hauppauge is very well known for having
at least some of their cards being wonderful under Linux. I don't know
if that holds for their whole line or not.

If you mainly want to just play your playstation through the computer
screen you can get one of these off Ebay for $15 shipped to your door.

Erik



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