Hi James,
2008/5/20 James Elsey james.elsey@serengeti-systems.com:
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 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.
Is it possible to not record the advert breaks, or even torecord multiple simultaneous channels?
It used to be the case that you needed one tuner per channel if you wanted to record simultaneously. In the latest versions of Myth you can record multiple channels at the same time using a DVB-T (Freeview) card if they happen to be on the same multiplex (frequency), e.g. BBC 1 and BBC 2.
Myth will always record commercials, it has commercial detection which runs as a post-process job which in theory can remove commercials from the recording but I've had mixed results with it. You can also run it to mark the commercials and just skip them on command (rather than cutting them out of the file).
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.
How much am I likely to pay for a freeview TV card?
I think my Nova-T was about £60 but that was a few years ago when they were new (and therefore more expensive). No idea now, try google.
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.
Ah, one slight problem, I don't particulary get a good signal inmy area, sometimes its ok, but for it to work I'd need to hook it up to a larger area that my TV uses, is that possible?
If you buy a normal aerial splitter it should work. I think tesco do them with 10m of cable for 8 quid or something.
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 :-)
What sort of size would a 1 hour TV show take on disc? I'mguessing this could in turn be run thru a converter to reduce the filesize?
I think MPEG2 from my DVB-T was about 1GB/hour but it depends on the bitrate (i.e. quality) of the transmission which is up to the TV company. The built in software encoder has adjustable bitrate, as has the hardware encoder on my PVR-150. In all cases Myth can run a transcode post-process job to convert to another (smaller) format and delete the original, e.g. MPEG4 at a lower bitrate.
JD