zilspeed
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 posted on 18/11/07 at 02:35 PM |
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TV Tuner card suggestions
I have spare PC here which I have been messing about with and installed Linux Mint on.
If all you do is surf, email and do standard tasks, it's a highly recommended way of sidestepping the microsoft tax. It is no different to
operate.
Anyway. Having now been sucked into the whole linux thing, I am going to install mythbuntu onto it and use it as
a PVR with all the attendant niceties.
I currently have a PCI analogue tuner card but fancy fitting a freeview card for this setup.
Any recommendations ?
Cheers
John F
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BenB
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| posted on 18/11/07 at 03:23 PM |
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Just be aware that PVR type duties can be quite taxing on the processor. Admittidly, it'll probably find life easier as its not running
Microshit bloatware on it.... but you may find the PVR software taking up a fair proportion of your CPU's abilities during recording...
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zilspeed
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| posted on 18/11/07 at 03:33 PM |
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That's fine - it won't actually have anything else to do really 
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Pdlewis
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| posted on 18/11/07 at 06:16 PM |
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I have just upgraded my PVR from 2 x Blackgold DVB-T tuner to a WinTV Nova-t 500 which is a single PCI with 2 onboard DVB-T freeview tuners and im
very happy with the quality and reliability of both these car makes.
I tryed an install of myth TV a few years ago and been a windows programmer found the world of linux bloody hard going and couldnt get it to work so i
went the windows MCE route. just for ref I run a p4 2.2ghz with 1gb of ram and it will very happily record 2 programs and be playing one while im
logged onto the box via remote desktop running sage accounts package so shouldnt worry to much about the spec of the box
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Project7
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| posted on 18/11/07 at 07:36 PM |
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The load on the processor depends on the Card as some have hardware mpeg encoding, some rely on the processor to do the encoding work.
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coozer
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| posted on 18/11/07 at 07:47 PM |
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I have a Winfast PVR2000 that has an onboard hardware mpeg2 processor. It doesn't task my Intel processor.
It's quite old now and I'm sure there are better ones for the £100 I paid around these days.
[Edited on 18/11/07 by coozer]
1972 V8 Jago
1980 Z750
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Noodle
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| posted on 19/11/07 at 09:50 PM |
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I've got a server in my loft running Ubuntu 7.10 with MythTV and a twin-tuner Nova-T 500.
It works a treat and never misses a beat. All the other PC's/laptops in the house can see it too.
The setup was painless, it's come a long way recently and my youngest (5) year old has no issues using it.
Remember that these digital TV cards have stuff-all processor loading and they simple stream the TV data directly to the hard disk. Mine's 512MB
Athlon 2000 (about 5 years old) and streams 2 TV channels to disk as well as streaming TV/radio programmes out over the network without any fuss. The
processor loading is negligible.
Cheers,
Neil.
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Keith Weiland
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| posted on 22/11/07 at 03:46 PM |
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I would suggest a Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T. There are many good card out
there but I know that this card works with linux.
quote:
Originally posted by Project7
The load on the processor depends on the Card as some have hardware mpeg encoding, some rely on the processor to do the encoding work.
While that is true of analogue cards, Freeview cards are Digital and so the information is already encoded with either MPEG-2 or H.264 so a hardware
encoder is not necessary and in fact not available on freeview only cards though some dual analogue/freeview cards do have a hardware encoder for the
analogue side.
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Peteff
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| posted on 23/11/07 at 03:10 PM |
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I built my computer after the old one died and have installed a KWorld DVB-T 210 card which does digital, analogue and FM radio. I have the wrong type
of aerial on the back of the house but it still managed to pick digital tv channels and the epg up.
yours, Pete
I went into the RSPCA office the other day. It was so small you could hardly swing a cat in there.
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Normsthename
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| posted on 27/11/07 at 11:22 AM |
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quote:
The load on the processor depends on the Card as some have hardware mpeg encoding, some rely on the processor to do the encoding work.
I agree!
If the card has hardware encoding it will run fine in the background recording while you do other things with the PC
One thing I would say is to buy a card with a digital tuner.
There are still cards being sold with analogue tuners, which won't be much use in a year or two.
Andy
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