[Cialug] MythTV HD tuner?

[Nathan C. Smith]

I have a pcHDTV that I was never able to get to work to my satisfaction.  The back-end machine is probably too slow.  It is an old AMD running at 2 GHz or so.

I have a friend who is skilled in the A-V art.  He agrees with you that OTA is better than Mediacom.  He suspects the Mediacom signal gets compressed and says that if you look at them side-by-side that OTA is much cleaner.

Interestingly, he also bought what he called the "Mother throw-down" Media Center PC from HP and has had much difficulty getting it to play back HD video.  It can play black blu-ray and stutters at points during the movie, cannot get the soundtrack in anything better than stereo without an expensive processor (which he has since purchased) and gets annoying borders around playback windows.

There is a border at the high end of PC-multimedia integration that you cannot cross without paying big bucks in licensing, or doing something "illegal" (see DMCA, etc).  He has been trying to do the right thing but HP is blocked by Microsoft who will not issue some kind of updates since they decided media playback at the high-end is an appliance feature not a consumer media PC feature.

I have decided I am, for now,  happy with MythTV and my DVD-quality playback and decided I would not want to push the envelope because the people creating this stuff don't even seem to have a handle on the legal issues even if they can do the technical pieces.  It seems to be a real mess and even Tivo is starting to suffer from it.  We had our TivoHD set to playback at 720p.  This weekend we got a message floating around the screen during playback that said the copyright holder of the program will not allow playback in HD.  It was a standard-def recording.  grr.

-Nate

________________________________
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of jrnosee at gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:53 PM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] MythTV HD tuner?

I have the Pinnacle 800i PCTV HD Card and I'm fighting to get it to work with MythTV/MythBuntu.  Every attempt I get closer.  I know for linux the only option for HD tuning used to be pcHDTV.  I've heard it works well, but never seen one in action.  The HDHomeRun seems like a great bet to me since I think all you do is setup the tuner box and it streams over ethernet. HDHR has 2 tuners and can handle ATSC or QAM (unencrypted cable) so it should work with OTA and Mediacom.  Last time I checked mediacom's offerings for HD they sucked anyways, you're better off just pulling in the OTA or QAM, you won't get much extra, and the only DVR likely to work with medicom's "extended" HD offerings would be their own DVR box.

--Justin

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 3:20 PM, Jonathan C. Bailey <jbailey at co.marshall.ia.us<mailto:jbailey at co.marshall.ia.us>> wrote:
I don't think HDHR will ever do CableCard. CableLabs wouldn't certify it, so they could never sell it. Typical..


----- Original Message -----
From: "Nathan C. Smith" <nathan.smith at ipmvs.com<mailto:nathan.smith at ipmvs.com>>
To: "Central Iowa Linux Users Group" <cialug at cialug.org<mailto:cialug at cialug.org>>
Sent: Tuesday, December 2, 2008 3:19:22 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
Subject: RE: [Cialug] MythTV HD tuner?

Maybe for Digital cable somebody knows better, but I think we are SOL.

Somebody here turned me on to the silicon HDHomerun and it is a pretty neat dual-tuner setup.  http://www.silicondust.com/products/hdhomerun

Maybe they will introduce one that accepts cablecards in the future.

Don't forget, you actually have to have a machine capable of playing back HD.  I think my backend machine will do some but my front-end, a 1.2 Ghz shuttle, will not.

-Nate

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org<mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org>
> [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org<mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org>] On Behalf Of David Champion
> Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:15 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
> Subject: [Cialug] MythTV HD tuner?
>
> For those of you MythTV users... what's the current state of
> the art for
> HD tuners for MythTV?
>
> I'm updating to a HDTV for xmas, and thinking about re-building my
> MythTV box. Have a PVR-250 card I can use for SD encoding, but I'm
> thinking about getting a HD card too.
>
> I don't have HD service yet (other than OTA). Currently my
> only option
> at my condo is Mediacom cable, and I'm only doing Extended
> Basic at this
> point. I've been trying to work on getting dish service in
> the building,
> but that's a longer process that has to go through the condo
> association.
>
> -dc
>
>
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