Hi James,
2008/5/20 James Elsey james.elsey@serengeti-systems.com:
Has anyone setup MythTV to record TV shows?
I've been using Myth for the past 4 or 5 years with version of Linux and a few different cards.
I've been experimenting with MythTV for a few weeks with various media formats, but I'm quite intrigued to see how TV recording works.
...
If anyone has this setup, can you let me know what TV card/apps are best?
I've used the Nova-T cards for recording from freeview. They were good because they output into an MPEG2 stream directly (using hardware encoding) and therefore I could use a less powerful PC for my TV box. Myth also pulls the program guide from them directly so you don't even need a 'net connection but if you don't do that it will use XMLTV to pull listings from RadioTimes.
I'm currently using a Hauppauge PVR-150 to record from my cable box (s-video) to MPEG2 (using hardware encoding) and I've previously used a normal TV card with the software encoding. I've used Mini-ITX boards with hardware based MPEG2 decoding to get even lower CPU usage but none of that is necessary.
If you have good freeview signal I'd recommend getting a Nova-T card (maybe one of the dual encoder versions so you can record two channels at once. The Myth wiki and the dvb linuxtv.org website are the best sources of information on compatible cards.
In general, my PCs seem to suffer most from the database load (although I am using low power machines) and the commercial detection has varied in quality over the years. I suspect it's best at US TV :-)
HTH,
JD