D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] TV tuners

 

Simon Waters wrote:
> Anyone using a DVB-T (think freeview) tuner with GNU/Linux care to tell
> me what hardware/software (including host PC CPU and spec).
> 
> I'm thinking about doing the "mythical convergence platform" for myself
> (too many things under the television, and none of them let us surf or
> check email, inspite of 4 remote controls -- one of them might be the
> stereos - who knows).
> 

I've not moved to DVB-T yet as I've still not done the cable runs for
the aerial, but I've been using MythTV with analogue TV cards (initially
the Hauppauge WinTV TV/FM cards and currently a pair of PVR250s) since
about v0.07.  When I initially installed it I was probably using one of
the pre-Fedora RedHat releases, subsequently moved to Fedora and now
CentOS (these days I just want something stable and easy to manage that
I don't need to reinstall for a long time).

Initially I was using a PIII-700 machine which could just about cope
with recording and was fine for playback, but couldn't do more than one
thing at once with any reliability.  Currently I'm using a 2.8GHz P4 of
the non-hyperthreading variety which has no problem recording two
programmes and doing playback at the same time (with the PVR250s).  I've
always made sure the machines had plenty of memory in -- the current box
has 1.5GB RAM, as I happened to have it lying about.

Personally I don't think I'd ever be desperate enough to read my email
or look at a webpage that I'd want to do it on a television set,
certainly not a CRT one anyhow, but even ignoring that I think the
Myth "music" interface is utterly horrible to use, so I don't.

The main thing I've not worked out yet is whether it's worth going to
the effort of hooking up the full 5-1 sound output, or going with the
optical link to the amp.

James

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html