Another PVR question

[Michael Gargiullo]

On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 11:05, Charles Howse wrote:
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> On Monday 19 April 2004 09:23 am, Michael Gargiullo wrote:
> 
> > > Prefer not to spend over $50 US on TV card.
> > > Can't afford any extra hardware.
> >
> > a $50 tuner card...  The best I've seen that works universally well is
> > the win250-pvr card from Haugpauge just over $100.
> 
> Yes, it looks like I'll have to exceed my budget by quite a bit.
> Circuit City has the HAU 980 you mention for $149.99 + tax.  $165 after tax 
> here in Jackson.  :-(
> It seems like a card that does the encoding/decoding onboard is the way to go, 
> rather than letting the CPU do it, eh?
> 

Absolutely!  



> > > Is my hardware good enough for what I want to do?
> >
> > Your hardware should work ok.  What video card do you have?
> 
> Excellent!  That's reassuring.  :-)
> I have a ATI Mach64 3D Rage iiC video card.
> 8 MB PCI.
> Will that be OK?  It will play .mpg files full-screen, but they're too 
> jittery, so I watch them in a window.

Nope...  while your out flexing the magic plastic, grab (Ok I know I'll
hear complaints for this) an ATI Radeon 9200 (With 128Mb of memory)
they're around $99 bucks... The binary drivers from ATI work very well.
nVidia also has great video cards, but I can't recommend any, I've never
used any of them.
> 
> > It's as easy as installing ATrpms rpm and typing yum install mythsuite
> 
> Ummm....ATrpms rpm?
> I already have atrpms-stable, good, testing and bleeding in my /etc/yum.conf, 
> although they're commented out.
> Which should I uncomment?
> 
uncomment stable and good


> Sounds too good to be true.  
> Are you saying it worked perfectiy out of the box?
> You didn't have to install any drivers or do any mind-boggling configuration?

ok you will have to be able to cut and paste (Better to understand,
but...) some config files, but the fedora how-to walks you through each
config, and what to change.
> 
> Are you running both the front-end and back-end on your main workstation?

I have them both running on the same machine. Mind you I have a
dedicated machine for this.
> 
> >
> > Check out the mythtv mailing list as well,  it's pretty active.
> 
> Right, I suppose that's a must for a PVR noob.  :-)

Lots of good info there.


For parts... check out www.newegg.com  (if you buy the ATI there... 
There are a few cards that use the ATI chipset, but are much cheaper...
I don't know if they'd work, but for about half the price it may be
worth it.  I bought the gigabyte radeon card for half what I paid for
the ATI card.)