[KLUG Members] Myth TV questions

[Bruce Smith]

>  I attended the presentation on Myth TV at the end of last year and I am 
> ready to make the jump.  I have two questions I was hoping someone could 
> help me with. 
> 
> 1. Is there a preferred Hauppauge card?  I have heard that some of them 
> are not supported bu SUSE.  I am debating between the 350 and the 500.  
> I am running a slightly older box and would like the Hauppauge card to 
> do as much of the encoding/decoding as possible.

I don't have either, but from what I've been reading on the MythTV
mailing list, I'd go with the 500 (or 150).

There is talk about the [older] 350 not being supported much longer.
Plus I've read a lot of stuff on how hard it is to get the DEcoder on
the 350 to work (TV out - not the ENcoder).

> 2. I have heard  that the Hauppauge card cannot capture all of the 
> channels that I subscribe to, like HBO.  I seem to recall at the 
> presentation hearing that I can use Myth TV and at least some of the 
> Hauppauge cards as a complete Tivo replacement.

That card can capture anything a standard TV can receive.  It is NOT a
HD card.  If you want to capture HDTV, you need a different card.

If you're going though some kind of cable/satellite box, you will need
some way for the PC to change channels on the box.  You may be able to
do it with a serial or firewire cable on some boxes.  Otherwise you'll
need an IR-blaster.

> I am currently running SUSE 10 on an AMD Athlon XP 2000, 256 MB DDR, Ge 
> force 400MX AGP card, 160GB HD.  Other that the PVR card, I am hoping to 
> start with this configuration and I will increase Hardware as necessary.

Personally I'd go with Fedora Core 4, if you're going to do it right
now.  I don't believe they have everything running on FC5 quite yet.
I'm sure that will change shortly.

I'd say that the vast majority of the people on the mailing list use
Fedora.  I know there are packages for other distros, including SuSE,
but they are not often discussed.  The docs for Myth on Fedora are
constantly maintained and are fantastic!

There is also talk about version 19.1 coming out "in days or hours" 
(that was a few days ago :)  which fixes some bugs in the current
release (19.0) - if you're not in a great hurry.  If you are in a hurry,
it's no big deal because upgrading shouldn't be too hard.

 - BS