Re: TV Cards - Advice

[Kim Wall <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Bendall wrote:

>>From what I have read this seems possible, but I have noticed that
> most cards require a high-spec machine. Therefore, do cards exist that
> have on-board "decoders" to take some of the load off the
CPU?

DVB tuner cards simply dump the stream (or parts of it) to disk.  The
'required' spec is probably pessimistically based on what is needed to
play back the stream.  In a record-only configuration, such as a MythTV
backend, the actual CPU requirements are minimal, so depending on what
you mean by 'distribute' this may be a non-issue.

As for on-board decoders, you're looking at something like the Hauppauge
PVR350's[1] hardware decoder.  I don't know of any DVB tuner with
something similar.  I suspect that there's little demand, as nearly any
modern (for fairly ancient values of modern) desktop machine can play
back an SD MPEG-2 stream.  HD does of course require more grunt.


Kim.
--

[1] An analogue MPEG2 encoder/decoder, which probably can't play the
MPEG2 transport streams you get from DVB tuners.

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