Foo - Trying to build my own media center: LinuxMCE/MythTV

Foo geeks I need some suggestions. Anyone ever messed with any of this stuff? I know Linux systems very well but I don't know TV stuff at all. I'm trying to find a tv tuner card now, one with a remote control and preferably dual tuners to be able to record and watch at the same time. Hauppauge seems to be the best going on the PCI platform which is what I need. So the first question is, there are cards that are ATSC/NTSC, ATSC, or NTSC. I've tried reading about all this and I just end up staring blankly. Is NTSC dead now? If so why do they still sell the stuff? I will be receiving all data through an antennae. I don't have cable or Satelite but would like to have the system built such that maybe one day I can. So do I need just an ATSC card or both?



regards.

get thee to www.avsforum.com (http://www.avsforum.com) and perhaps asketh thy question in the HTPC Linux thread (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=30&f=76)?

I have a MythTV setup on one of my computers using a Hauppage PVR150 card. Works great. NTSC is still handy for hooking up certain things, but isn't required. Most tuners nowdays will do both, so I wouldn't worry about it.

You will definitely want to look through the MythTV hardware lists, to see which specific Hauppage card will work out of the box... even the same model card will sometimes have a different encoder chip in it year to year, which makes updating drivers a pain for the Linux kernel programmers.

If you have any other specific questions, I don't mind answering if I can help...

Cool thanks Funky I may hit you up with a few questions.

yes ntsc is dead unless you still have cable that hasn't switched to hdtv yet

many of the newer hybrid cards will do either, in your case atsc is all you need

mythtv if you use something like mythbuntu is basically plug and play, simply start with suitable hardware and put in an install disk and go from there

setting up mythtv is a bit complicated cause it can do an awful lot but for the most part the setup menus are pretty self explanatory and the documentation at mythtv is pretty good

couple things to consider:
disk bandwidth, do not skimp on it, hdtv sends several megabytes per second at your hard drive, use SATA and get a sizable disk and if possible use two with a dedicated disk for recording onto

you may very well re-encode most recordings to save space, mythtv will do that and flag commercials, just keep in mind it takes some serious cpu power to do this with any speed so if you build an atom based htpc keep that in mind as the performance will suck and hdtv files are damn big to begin with

I also recommend a dual tuner or a pair of them, it helps if you can record one channel while watching another.

don't skimp on a tuner card, make sure it has hardware mpeg2 encoding

another new option is a network tuner that connects to your htpc via ethernet, mythtv will work with those and has the added bonus of working on all pc's on the network :) they basically stream the video/audio to whatever is setup to receive it right over ethernet

you can also play back from the mythtv box over ethernet by simply setting up samba to share the recording directory on the htpc, that is how I do it

I have been using mythbuntu for a few years now with few issues once it was set up.