disciple@exis.net wrote:
At this point, I would probably get the PVR-500 or maybe just the PVR-150. The PVR-150 replaces the 250 and the 350 just has tv-out that you can use through the ivytv framebuffer and a FM tuner. If all you are looking for is MythTV and not MythVideo and MythDVD or MythGame on one machine. I would get the PVR-350 and use tv-out on it. The tv-out is pretty much the best I've seen but It doesn't really work with anything else very well. Otherwise get a 150/250/500 with something else for the tv-out. Nvidia hardware seems to be popular, it's what I'm currently using also. But my backend is on a system with no monitor attached and I have frontends sitting at the tv's. (tuners are in the backend and stream to the frontends with nvidia cards for the tv-out)This MythTV sounds really cool. I've been reading about it for a few weeks now, and would like to try it. I have a couple of questions for those that have it running. 1. What card would you suggest that I use? 2. To install, do I just do apt-get install mythtv? What are the steps to installation? I'll be starting with a clean machine. Compaq Deskpro PIII 866 MHz with a 120GB hard drive. I'm looking to install a basic PVR with one capture card for now. Once I get that working, I'd like to add more cards to record multiple programs at the same time.
With the current stable branch of ivytv drivers, you can use a 250 and a 350... But the unstable branch is almost complete with support for the 150 and 500 (500 is dual 150's on a single board). A large portion of ivytv users are already using unstable though.
So if you get one of those cards you can run the thing just fine on an 866. I have a Athlon 1 gig with 256 mb of memory and I've never had a problem with the performance. But if you get a cheaper card that requires a software encoder/decoder, you'll need a much more powerful system to really run it well. And if your looking for HDTV, that's pretty much your only option right now as nothing in that area has hardware encoders/decoders.
One thing to note is that most of the debian howto's say stuff about how you have to compile your own kernel/lirc/etc.... Just so you know, that isn't the case as you can pretty much stay stock and still run MythTV. All I compiled was the ivtv drivers and ptune to change the channels. The rest of it is from the repo listed on MythTV's documentation for debian and proper.
-Mike