Re: [edlug] Anyone want to give an edlug technical talk on PVR/DVB?

[Greg Lewin <greglewin@xxx.xxx.xxx>]

Ed wrote:

> It looks like I might have some work coming in (hallelujah!) and first on my list of new toys is a mini-ITX digital-TV PVR 'cum media player.
>
> Could someone who has already built one of these care to give a technical talk at one of the monthly meetings so the rest of us could find our path a bit easier? Failing that could you give me some one-to-one advice in case/when I get stuck?
>
> Ed
>  

I've been having similar ideas, since it looks as if mini-ITX boards are 
an idea whose time has come  - 1 GHz is plenty for most applications 
including sound & vision, and the notion of silence from the box itself 
is very attractive.

I'd guess that expertise on the subject of concocting PVR boxes is a) 
very thin on the ground and b) very recent where it exists at all. Would 
there be interest in a workshop-style meeting where nobody is expected 
to know the answers, but these are collectively arrived at by building 
one (or several from different parts) and solving the problems as they 
arise? By definition this would be much harder to schedule as its 
duration could not be forecast with any certainty. Or perhaps people 
would prefer to tinker on their own as usual - I guess that's my first 
impulse.

For starters I'm wondering which PVR card to go for: one I've been 
looking at is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350 (internal), or possibly the 
Hauppauge Win TV PVR USB (external). Even after reading all the blurb 
it's not entirely clear which is better, and I know very little about 
cards from other manufacturers (I have had an old Hauppauge Tv card for 
a few years now; it gives good enough live pictures, though I don't 
think it's usable for recording high-quality video to disk - unless it's 
possible to pipe the output into a soft MPEG encoder (the output is raw 
.avi at high bandwidth, too much for my IDE disks in terms of speed and 
far too much in terms of capacity). ).

Any ideas?

Greg.


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