[OT] Re: [ale] pci video card with TV in

[John Wells]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, George Carless wrote: 
> Perhaps, but consider that for ~$300 you can get something like an Athlon
> XP 1700, 40gig hard drive, and a couple of tv cards.  

Since I have no experience with Tivo,  I could be completely wrong.  

That said, I challenge you to put a box together that has two stereo tv 
cards, a video card that support video out (for transmission to the set), 
and a CPU with enough power to encode both streams for under $300.  Hell, 
if you could, I'd probably be inclined to buy one. 

"The developer states that his AMD1800+ system can almost encode two MPEG4 
video streams and watch one program simultaneously."  
--from 
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1

I actually looked at building a MythTV box back in December when I got my 
first stereo tv card.  But giving up one of my machines just doesn't seem 
worth it when I consider the money I have invested in them.  And it seems 
that it'd probably take my Athlon 2200XP to truly do both live and 
recording.

>Spend a little more
> to stick in some extra ram, and you have a pretty nice box -- and one that
> will do a lot more than a hypothetical hacked Tivo would.

Quite true.

>  I doubt that
> the "viewing" element is nearly as processor-intensive as the recording,
> either 

Actually, I believe MythTV performs the exact same encoding on both 
streams...to MPEG-2.  You're right that watching tv with something like 
xawtv has virtually no CPU cost, but it's also at a very low 
resolution and unspectacular quality...something encoding attempts to 
remedy, I believe.

Still, a pc with MythTV would indeed serve more useful than a hacked 
Tivo...assuming you had some cycles left over to work with...

John

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