On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Greg Lewin wrote:
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'm building a PVR based around a VIA M10000 motherboard, and the WinTV
Nova-T card. The Nova-T card is DVB, so you get a digital stream, and
shouldn't have to worry about the processor load of the encoding step.
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).
The PVR 350 has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder and decoder. The USB PVR model
doesn't appear to have a hardware MPEG-2 encoder, the USB 1 version
will only support recordings of up to 6 MBits/sec.
You may not find the lack of a hardware MPEG-2 decoder a problem,
especially if you're using a motherboard (such as the M10000) with
hardware MPEG support [1]
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
This is what quite a few people have been building PVRs out of. In
fact, Hauppauge cards now come with a 'SoftPVR' for Windows which allow
you to time shift and record straight from these kinds of cards. Of
course, you can pretty much kiss your processor goodbye whilst doing so
:)
On the Linux front, MythTV supports soft encoding, and you can
downsize the resolution in order to fit the abilities of your
processor and disk. Bear in mind, however, that if you want to do things
like 'pause live TV' your processor has to fast enough to support both
encoding and decoding simulatenously.
Cheers,
Simon.
[1] Note, however, that the support for hardware MPEG on the M10000 is
dependent on either binary drivers from VIA, or on a reverse engineered
set of drivers, which are under very active development.
-
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