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PostPosted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 11:34 pm 
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Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:05 am
Posts: 10
I thought I'd share my notes on the process

1) dvb-fe-nxt2004.fw is included. So no need to get the kernel sources and run get_dvb_firmware, etc.

2) as mentioned on this page, http://www.graffagnino.net/frankie/blog ... h-htpc.php, you'll need to comment out the line in /etc/init.d/Knoppmyth-tv that calls /usr/local/bin/tvterm.sh. I just replaced it with a 'modprobe saa7134' (which is followed by the 'moprobe saa7134-dvb' which was already present in the script)

That's pretty much it. i was able to add a tuner card, add a video source using over-the-air programming info, it scanned the channels, and I was in business.

Now I'm running up against the limitations of my PC (an old AMD sempron 2400, with on-board nvidia nv18/gforce4 mx, & a quarter GB of ram). I get some random thin horizontal lines on the display which I assume is from my PC not being able to keep up, and sometimes it just flat out skips or smears the frame and you see large blocks everywhere. This is a nearly 3 year old machine that I just had sitting around so I don't expect superb performance.

Does anyone have some hardware recs for me, either a faster PC or how about a decoder card? I already have a pvr-350 that i'm using on my old NTSC myth box, is there something like that I can use but for HDTV?

thanks,

Dave


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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 1:36 am 
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Joined: Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:27 am
Posts: 125
your cpu is fine.. many will tell you it's not quite enough for hd.. but it's certainly worth a go. unless your hd is 1080p. in australia, hd is mostly only 720p.. but it's different in europe and the us.

you do need more ram. with 256mb, i had only a very unstable box. 512mb will help, 1 gig to make certain - given your video card is taking some.

your pvr350 has an build in hardware encoder to encode analog telly to mpeg. without this your cpu would need to encode this. digital tv is broadcasts in (pretty much) mpeg.. so your tuner card doesnt need to encode it to anything. basically the card just dumbs it to you hdd. the strain on your cpu with HD comes from playing it back.

you might like to delay transcoding till when your aren't watching playback.. you'll need as much as you've got to ensure smooth playback

even a slow hdd will keep up - dont worry too much about that.. but enable dma for pata drives


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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 5:23 pm 
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Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:05 am
Posts: 10
I'm not sure what resolutions various stations are broadcasting. is there anything in the OSD that will show you that? Nothing stands out to me.

Some stations play great and others are choppy. I don't know anything about HDTV's modulation scheme or whether it uses error correcting codes, does the CPU have to do more work on a weaker signal?

The local public TV station KCTS (here in seattle) plays great. Others, even lower resolution ones, stutter or get smeared with mpeg blocks.

By the way I added another 512MB memory and it plays much better now. I'll get a nicer machine at some point but I want to research the hardware a bit more and get a system that can handle NTSC analog cable as well as HDTV.


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