What I have tried… (part 2)

Continued from here (sorta). At least the titles are the same.

After a break from Mythtv I decided I needed to change some things. I needed to be able to watch and record HDTV. I thought this would not be very difficult at first. I soon found out I was very wrong.
Step 1: Computer

Processor
The first thing HDTV needs is a lot of processing power. Most of the Mythtv documentation says you can watch live HDTV on as low as a 2.4 Pentium 4. This depends a lot on how much you know about linux and how much you can shave the operating system down and get a good enough video card. It also helps if you run a backend and frontend on different machines. As soon as you get a 3.2 Pentium 4 or above you shouldn’t have any problems but you will also need a couple of other things if you are going to have other things going on (such as more tuners). I currently have a P4 3.0 and HD shows well as long as I am not doing anything else on the computer and there is no overlay over the picture.

RAM as much as this doesn’t seem like it matters it does. With 2 HD tuners you will probably want at least 512 Mb of ram and possibly more. I currently have 1GB of ram but I am not sure if less ram would affect the playback very much as it would the system loading/responding.

Video card From experience I would recommend a Nvidia video card. If you want a quiet system you can find FX 6200’s without fans and also half height. This is what I am using right now in one of my frontends and it only cost me about $40 (I probably could have found it a bit cheaper but I didn’t look around much). The 5600’s are a bit more supported by Nvidia drivers at this time but I wanted the best half height video card I could get. The best thing about the Nvidia cards is you will be able to offload some of the HD decoding to the video card (XvMC). At least that is what I thought at first. I know now that XvMC can’t do much with a HD frame because it is too big. This leaves all of your video encoding and decoding on the processor. Once again a it is a really good Idea to get at least a P4 3.0. I would recommend a processor with Hyperthreadding or multiple cores at this point because even a plane P4 in my machine seems to be having problems at times.

Step 2: Pick a card, not just any card.

So starting from scratch, what HD hardware encoding cards are available for Linux?

1. pchdtv – This tuner was designed for linux by linux users. The tuner has gone through quite a few changes from the first pchd2000 card but it is still a great card made specifically for linux pvr software. One downfall of this card is its price. Because the card is made by hobbyists it cannot be as cheap and as available as some of the other cards that are made by large companies. The best part about these cards is the fact that you can know you will always have support from the linux community with this card.

2. Air2pc – This is a bit of an older card from what I have found but it has been the longest supported HD card in Mythtv. I have never had the joy of using this card but I know when I first got my FusionHDTV card most people had this card instead. From what I can tell the support on this card is about the same as the Fusion card but the QAM doesn’t work as well with this card (if at all)

3. FusionHDTV – I had this card for a little while and loved it. The one I bought came with a remote and it also had Compontent inputs which was great for playing and recording Halo. The card had great QAM support and had decent OTA reception. A couple of things I did not like with this card were the fact that it seemed to take a little time to change channels but with only a handful of digital channels that isn’t always a big deal. And the fact that it took up a PCI slot was kind of a bummer if you only had 2 slots. The time this card came out there was no other option though because USB HD cards were slim to none and there was nothing else out there. Then came the HDHomerun.

4. HDHomerun – This is just a cool device in general. Take a tuner card and make it available to any computer on the network. Then make it so you can control it from any computer on the network and then make it 2 tuners. That is basically what you get with the HDHR. It is its own class of device. This is not a PCI tuner, it is not a USB tuner, it is a network attached tuner that you just plug in two coax cables, nework, and power and you are set. The tuner is not as supported as some of the other tuners but it makes up for it with updates that come out at least once a month (so far). I haven’t been able to test with this tuner as much as I would like to so far but from what I have used it is great. HD wirelessly to my laptop is just a great, great thing.

Step 3: Picture is nice, but what about sound?
I am still working on good surround sound to work in linux. I haven’t tried much but I know the Turtle beach mirco usb sound card hasn’t been working well for me. This will have to be continued at another time when I can figure out something that works well for me.

Step 4: Controls
You have many options for controls but obviously most people want a remote to do all of their bidding. I still don’t have a remote so I have just been using my wireless keyboard. I will continue this once I do get a remote but for now I will give you the keyboard controls for mythtv.