On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 10:13:06PM -0800, Greg Bell wrote: > > I'm putting an PII/300 to work in the living room doing various > firewall, terminal, and MP3 type things. I'd like to turn it into a PVR > as well. I have a K6-300 lying around but I have been very doubtful that it would be effective at real-time capture and encoding after doing much of it on my Athlon 800 and seeing what it takes CPU-wise. > I don't care about time shifting, just basic VCR type functionality (but > it'll be more fun :). It'll have a big disk so hopefully I won't need > hardware assisted encoding. Well, CPU is the more important factor. But I suppose one could argue that the more disk you have the less CPU you need because you can tolerate very large encodings. > Basic question not yet answered after a few weeks of lurking: Am I better > off with a product like ATI's all-in-wonder type cards, or with a separate > capture/tuner (Hauppauge WinTV-PCI) and TV Out (Nvidia GE2 MX-400) combo? Interesting question. I went the separate route and bought the ATI TV-Wonder. I am now in search of the best TV-Out solution. Ideally I want framebuffer output (Mplayer supports some framebuffer and TV-Out solutions but I have yet to get anyone to commit to "the ideal" on the Mplayer list), hardware scaling and TV-Out. I think the Nvidia chips do all of the above but I am leary of getting into a situation where you are dependent on a hardware vendor continuing to produce drivers. If they should one day decide that Linux is no longer worth the effort, the hardware will be junk. > I don't have a ton of home entertainment equipment so ideally I'd be able > to take coax in and have coax out. I think most TV-Out video cards have composite and S-video out. I bought an RF modulator that takes composite and L/R stereo audio in and modulates that into an RF signal on coax for plugging into the (ancient) TV (in my living room). The box cost CAN$40 at my local A/V/computer shop. b. -- Brian J. Murrell
