MythTV hardware (was: MythTV Installfest Beta...)

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Sun Mar 4 23:47:25 EST 2007


On 3/4/07, Greg Kettmann <greg at kettmann.com> wrote:
> I'd be interested to know what your recommendations would be ...

  As maddog said, our InstallFest will have some kind of
recommendations/requirements -- a Hardware Compatibility List (HCL),
as we say in the pro IT world.  The plan is that if you stick to the
HCL, you will have good results.  If you're looking for minimal
frustration and maximum ease-of-use, I suggest waiting for that.

  That said, not everyone will be attending said event(s), there may
be other options than our HCL (which is as much about our own limited
resources in not being able to support 50 different cards), and (most
of all) this list displays a incorrigible tendency to diverge from
stated topic, so here's an attempt to at least mark the discussion
with a different Subject line.  :)

  This has been a topic of discussion on gnhlug-discuss over the past
couple months; you may want to search the archives for "mythtv":

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug

  There is also a GNHLUG webpage:

http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MythTV

> ... capture card (PCR-150?) ...

  Hauppauge has apparently discontinued the PVR-150 card, but
continues to put out boxes labeled "PVR-150" which instead contain the
HVR-1600 card.  This wouldn't be such a big deal, except that the
PVR-150 works with Linux and the HVR-1600 doesn't.  Again, consult the
archives.

> ... output card (NVidia 5200 family??).

  NVIDIA definitely appears to be the preferred video output device in
the Linux world these days.  ATI's support for FOSS sucks a lot
(NVIDIA's still sucks (binary-only, closed, proprietary drivers), but
sucks less than ATI).  Intel's stuff is documented, but is slow and
targeted at business applications, not consumer multimedia.

> Any discussion of audio (5.1 and no clue for a card but it would nice if it were
> bundled into one of the other cards).

  Audio these days generally divides into one of two categories:

- On-board (built in to the motherboard), fair to poor quality
- Dedicated audio expansion card (Sound Blaster, et. al.), fair to
excellent quality

  It appears the on-board audio is often good enough for TV.

  Some video and/or capture cards have sound hardware, but everything
I've seen has been 2 channel stereo only.

-- Ben


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