On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 03:29 +0000, Wookey wrote: > Hi, > I'm new to this PVR lark, although I have been using an EPIA min-ITX box as > a Divx/DVD player using geexbox for a year or two. > > I hope this list is OK for asking relative newbie questions - please point > me elsewhere if it's not the right spot. > > I want to add DVB-T reception to my media box, and ideally have it replace > the video recorder too, but it remains to be seen if it has sufficient welly. > > A fair amount of net-wandering suggests that the Hauppage winTV USB and USB2 > cards are both suported but they use different chipsets - is that right? Any > pros and cons between them? My gut feeling is that the USB2 should be better > as the interface to it is faster, but the hauppage specs say that the older > card needs a 500Mhz host, whilst the newer one needs a 1Ghz host. Does the > newer one really need more from its host, or this just an effect of the > (windowsa) software they supply? Also I can find a lot more docs for the > older device - is the new one a bad idea at this stage? When I tried the windows software for a PCI Nova-T several years back it was really nasty and clunky and crashed all the time. I have one of each of these two USB devices. The original winTV USB device 'just worked' with vdr once I'd built the drivers for it. Unfortunately, the bandwidth of USB 1 is so low that you can only use one channel at a time. If I tried two recordings at the same time, all I got was two recordings comprising random block pictures and lots of nasty sounds! Even with a single channel it can struggle if the bit-rate is high. I don't think there is a way of restricting a specific device in vdr so that it will only ever record / stream a single channel. The newer USB 2 device (which I bought because the old one was so crap!), needs firmware which may take a bit of fiddling to get it loading with hotplug. I have got this device autoloading drivers and firmware, and it works fine with things like 'tzap' and then 'cat /dev/dvb/adaptor0/dvr0' into a file gives a perfect DVB stream. However, so far I have not managed to get vdr to talk to the thing! It recognises it as a DVB device but just doesn't get a DVB stream from it. I'm not sure whether I have got a new version of it, or something like that, but it's really annoying because it works fine, just not with vdr! :-( I think there is something strange with the filter timeout because 'scan' from dvb-apps won't work unless it is told to use a longer timeout. I am guessing that this may be the cause of my problems with this device and vdr. I need to sit down and do some debugging... > My box is very slow (and thus silent) - it's an EPIA 800Mhz box, too old to > have built in MPEG deconding. It plays divxs fine, but glitches slightly > playing Full-res DVDs. I think adding a hollywood + PCI card will help it do > playback with less load, and is the only chance of it being able to play > something whilst recording something else. But that will fill its only PCI > slot, which is why I am considering USB for the TV input. Does this make > sense, or should I forget trying to play and record at the same time and > just put in a PCI winTV card? With a PCI Nova-T, I can quite happily record two streams (from same multiplex) and watch another recording at the same time. > I could upgrade the box to use an M10,000 motherboard and an internal DVB-T > card instead but that's best part of 100 quid more expensive, so I'm hoping > to get away with it. TV quality is not too important, so long as it's not much > worse than a VCR, that's fine. I'm doing this on an Epia MII-12000 using software MPEG decoding which means CPU usage is about 60-70%, which isn't really optimal. A dxr3 / Hollywood+ card does give a really good output but some people have a really hard time getting them going in a stable manner. I have a PCI DVB-T card in the same box so I can't use my dxr3 in it. Hope some of that helps. Cheers, Laz
