[ale] linux PVR raises questions

[Mark Angeli]

And the process you take would make a great write up/presentation at a
meeting...... :-D

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-admin at ale.org [mailto:ale-admin at ale.org]On Behalf Of John
To: ale at ale.org
Wells
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 8:56 AM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] linux PVR raises questions


Stephen Turner said:
> and thought it might be fun to play with. at 1ghz you think it would run a
> pvr nicely?

I've been doing quite a bit of research regarding linux pvr solutions.

First and foremost, you have to realize that the hardware requirements are
rather steep and really depend on what tuners you use.  If you use a
regular tuner like ATI's TV-wonder or a Win-TV card that use software
encoding, you should count on getting a processor that can contribute 1ghz
of power to each stream.

So, if you wish to be able to record while watching live tv, or be able to
pause/rewind live tv, you'll *have* to have two tuners, so if you opt for
the software-encoded tuners you'll need at least 2 ghz of processing
power.

There is an alternative, however.  You can buy a tuner that provides
hardware encoding, like the Hauppauge PVR-250 or 350.  The 250 will run
you approx. 100 bucks on Ebay (134 at amazon), so they're not cheap, but
they offload much of the load on the processor, so you'll have to weigh
the costs/benefits.

Overall, building a Linux pvr is *not* cheap.  Still, it's definitely
geeky, and definitely cool.

John

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