MythTV questions

I ordered another TV yesterday, and now that I'm completely spoiled by my ReplayTV, I need to acquire a PVR to go along with it. I have considered getting another Replay, and I'm not entirely opposed to that idea, but by this point MythTV has come along so far that I'm leaning towards going that route. Also, my ReplayTV can't record HDTV, and I'd like to be able to do that. I am full of questions on the subject. I have read the doc on the mythtv.org website, but I'm asking these questions here to find out what your experiences have been, and what you'd recommend based on your experiences. So here are my initial questions ;-D :

Filesystems:
Are you guys using the XFS/JFS + LVM recommended in the doc? If so, are you happy with it, or is it a big PITA? If not, do you wish you were?

Hard disk(s):
I put a 250GB drive in my ReplayTV and I fill it up, so I'm thinking I probably shouldn't even attempt to go lower than 160GB, at an absolute minimum. For those of you that want a lot of record space, what are you using? One big disk, or a couple of them? RAID? If so, HW or SW?

Component input/output:
This is probably the world's dumbest question, but it's not immediately obvious to me: what do you use to get a component output from your MythTV box to your TV? Or component input from your cable box to your MythTV box? All I see on these cards is composite and s-video. :-(

Capture card(s):
I'm no capture card expert by any means. I do think that there are two features that I'd like to have though: hardware encoding and HDTV capture support. Now, I'm a bit confused about the HD stuff. Is it possible to record HDTV/cable? Everything I'm seeing talks about HDTV via an external antenna. I just want to be able to record the HD shows that I can see via my Cox HD digital cable. Am I overly optimistic? Are any of you using HD capture cards? If so, do you have two separate cards, one for HD and one for standard TV? How difficult was it to get a MythTV HD setup to work with your TV?

IR blasters:
Which one do you use, and do you like it? Is it slow when changing channels on your Cox digital cable box?

Remote controls:
Which ones do you like? Do you use the mappings in the MythTV doc, or something else?

Base computer:
So I'll want a pretty high-powered machine since I'll probably be dealing with multiple capture cards and possibly HD stuff. Of course I'd like to spend as little $ as possible, while still being able to do as much as possible. :D One possibility is the Dell SC420; I have one of them already that I use as my main dev machine, and I'm pretty happy with it. The price seems pretty good: for $587.00, you can get a 2.8GHz HT P4, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 160GB SATA HD. The major weakness of this system is the video, or lack thereof. It has no AGP slot. For PCI, it has 2 PCI Express slots, one of which is 8x and the other of which is 1x, and 3 32bit/33MHz/5v standard PCI slots. If the setup I want requires a nice video card, the lack of AGP or 16x PCI-E slot would render such a box pretty much useless. Any suggestions on machines with similar specs, but that might be better-suited to the task at hand?

Thanks ever so much!

- Colleen

OK here we go. I don't have a system built to do this yet but I have been tinkering around for a while and I have a customer that wants a custom DVR setup.

Filesystsems: Generally LVM is a good idea. This way you can add more space without too much pain. I don't know about specific filesystems but it seems like ext3 has gotten over its 2G file limit Although any journaling filesystsem should work. I would lean to XFS since that is from SGI and they have to handle large files.

Hard disks: I personally would not go with anything under 300G. The system that I at least dream about has 3 400G drives in it. I would also just go with LVM without the raid. The performance you will really not need unless you are going to get multiple things going (transcoding, several record and playback streams, etc). I would say Raid only if you need the performance and redundancy.

Component I/O and Capture cards: This is mostly going to depend on the card that you get. Basically dig into the features of the card if you can. I know some of the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR cards have component IO but don't do HD. For most of the cards that I have looked at are not HD and don't have component IO. Currently HDTV is still a mine field of standards and confilcts. HDTV tuners and capture cards only work for over the air stuff. Cable has a different spec so cards that work with over the air signals will not work with Cable signals (at least directly).

IR Blasters: Don't know. Maybe looking into this if I get my big dish satellite tv stuff up and working.

Remote Controls: Another Don't know. I have a Hauppauge media MVP which lets me stream content to it and use the TV for the display. The remote on it is OK. Some of the buttons could be bigger. (IE stop, play, pause, etc) Comforable and not impossable to use.

Base computer: Mainly what you are aiming for is something that has enough bus bandwidth. So this really comes down to which motherboard chip set is used. I would aim for the latest and greatest intel or nvidia chip. The main problem is going to be PCI. There is only so much bandwidth on the PCI bus. PCIe is the answer to that but I have yet to see a capture card for it yet. As far as the processor is concerned unless you plan on transcoding your mpegs to divx or other format you won't need the fastest thing on the market but get something that will work well with the board.

This is mostly a brain dump on the subject. Mainly when I look at the box I would like to build for this purpose I seem to spec out near server hardware. Mainly for the bandwidth and bus capabilities. Maybe I am just going to far. I don't have any real expericance putting one together. I tried a while back but got a little frustrated working with the system (a bad asus motherboard that didn't run right) and I have not tried again yet.

Component I/O and Capture cards: This is mostly going to depend on the card that you get. Basically dig into the features of the card if you can. I know some of the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR cards have component IO but don't do HD.

Do you happen to have a model number for a Hauppage one with component I/O? From this page:
http://hauppage.com/Pages/compare_pvr.html
I can't see that any of them do - just composite and svideo.

For most of the cards that I have looked at are not HD and don't have component IO. Currently HDTV is still a mine field of standards and confilcts. HDTV tuners and capture cards only work for over the air stuff. Cable has a different spec so cards that work with over the air signals will not work with Cable signals (at least directly).

Crap! I was afraid that might be too good to be true, and I guess it was... Of course, without HD, component video between the cable box and the TV really doesn't give you anything great (I have a standalone DVD player), so I suppose it does simplify things.

Thanks very much for your reply ;-)

- Colleen

I would have to concur on all of Roberts thoughts, and stress that if you are going to have multiple cards in one box, make sure you have plenty of bus speed and fairly fast hard drives. Two SATA drives on seperate controllers or even Disk striping would be preferable.

And the proc need not play a part unless you are transcoding. If you are transcoding beef up the proc, and if you transcode you can get by with less hd space providing you don't forget to transcode :)

Nuvexport has some cool new features so that will make things easier if you go that route.

2 and a half cents

and don't forget that you've only got a couple more months to secure an HDTV tuner card that'll ignore the broadcast flag. even though I rarely watch TV, I need to get off my ass and go to http://www.pchdtv.com and get one myself, just for insurance (also, I have to admit that I kind of like the idea of supporting a company that releases hardware that has supported linux drivers, but unsupported Windows drivers).

Oops sorry about that. I was thinking that this made component video available but it is just another set of inputs:

http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/pName/hauppauge-av-cable-set-for-pvr150-250-350-500/cName/pvr-cardstv-tuners?osCsid=bff09a78f4a5b09311a3b6dd1460281e

HDTV has become a bit of a mine field here as of late. Will be interesting to see what happens when everything finally settles out.

I will not bow down to the pressure to buy one of these before the broadcast flag gets tweaked. And when and if this flag gets tweaked I will just refuse to watch tv.

While I believe I will be in the minority, I just can't reward the Networks, etc. for pushing for this stupid position.

Well........off my soapbox now......I guess following suit I guess I should stop watching movies as well, damn......time to read more books.

:)

I will not bow down to the pressure to buy one of these before the broadcast flag gets tweaked. And when and if this flag gets tweaked I will just refuse to watch tv.

I'm of a similar opinion, but it's more monetary-related.

Here's the problem:
So you can buy one of these cards now and avoid broadcast flag dilemmas later on. Yippee! But consider the limitations (as I have recently unfortunately learned - thanks Robert!): since these cards can only record the over-the-air broadcasts, you can *only* use them to capture local network HD broadcasts, and you can only do this by attaching your tuner to an antenna. If I wanted TV crap on my roof, I'd have satellite, thank you very much. :D

Then there's the cost: $200 for the ability to record local network shows in HD? Not for me. I'd gladly shell out the money if it could capture HD from my cable box, because then I could use it to capture movies from premium HD channels like HBO HD and Showtime HD, as well as content from other HD channels as they are added by Cox (supposedly we will get Starz HD before too long, etc...).

I really enjoy watching TV, and watch a fair amount of it. But one of the reasons that I do is because I can do it on my own time without having to be tethered to the TV at whatever time the network decides to broadcast a show I want to watch. If the networks decide to deny me the right to record their shows so that I can watch them at my leisure, well, screw them and their shows. I'm certainly not going to pay $200 for such a dubious privilege. :P

- Colleen

excellent! you guys hold on to that righteous indignation! when (I'm not even going to bother with using the "if" part of "if/when" for this issue) the broadcast flag comes in, maybe I'll have some company in the "doesn't watch TV" club.

My opinion of the whole matter would seem to be very similar to that of wolfie. So I was a bit heartened on hearing this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR2005050600835.html

Also, I believe I have heard that you can control the HD cable box and receive video from it via a firewire connection. But I certainly can't vouch for that, as I only subscribe to analog cable now. Now back when I had digital cable, I remember that box had a USB port, but I don't know about firewire.

Nice to see that our court system still has a little strength left, hopefully the RIAA or MPAA won't be buying judges like they do with our congress :)