I've been running a PVR-350 setup for a couple years and am pretty happy with it (I almost never watch live TV). However, my 15 year old TV is starting to die. I've been considering buying a 16:9 HDTV to replace it, but in order to take advantage of HD, I'd have to either

1. Watch ATSC live
2. Sign up for digital cable and try to set up recording via Firewire
3. Record/plaback using TV's tuner and i.Link
4. Get an HD-3000

I really don't think I can stomach going back to watching live TV, and I don't want to flush money down the Time-Warner toilet if I can help it. The i.Link options sounds pretty cool, but I'm not sure it's even possible. From what I can, by trying to use i.Link you're pretty much falling off the leading edge.

That pretty much leaves the HD-3000 option, but I'm afraid that would require more horsepower than I've current got in my Shuttle ST62K with a 2.4GHz P4 and built-in Radeon 9100 video chipset (according to /proc/cpuinfo the CPU is actually running at 3GHz, which I find very surprising -- I didn't intend to overclock it when I set up the system). It's a great, (and very quiet) little machine who's CPU is mostly idle thanks to the PVR-350. It is nice having enough horsepower to decode, deinterlace, and scale downloaded video files. Not that I would download anything that was violating copyrights, of course.

Recording HDTV with an HD-3000 isn't an issue because the system is just taking the transport stream containing MPEG2 and shoving onto the disk, right? Same as recording from the '350 but with a higher bit-rate.

Is there any way to avoid using the motherboard's CPU for decoding the MPEG2 stream on playback? It seems silly to decode, deinterlace, and scale the video stream in software and shove raw video at the TV when it knows how to decode and up/down convert the stream.

Are there HDTV monitors that accept a transport stream via Firewire? (Is that what i.Link does?) If that can be done, I suppose it makes an OSD impossible unless the monitor will composite the transport stream together with a VGA or S-Video input.

Playing back HDTV recording using the 350 would be a waste, so I suppose I would need to switch to using the on-board Radeon 9100 chipset which only has S-Video and VGA outputs.

Would I be beating my head against the wall by trying to use my existing Shuttle box? It only has a single PCI slot and no AGP slot, so expansion capacity is, uh, shall we say limited...

If I'm going to start from scratch on both the Myth box and the TV, what would be a good route to take?[/list]

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Grant

just to help you, iLink is another term for Firewire

You can also get VGA to component adapters and some HDTV can take a VGA input

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Girkers

The onlything right now available to help lower cpu for hd playback is nvidia xvmc support. pvr350 won't do it nor will the standard epia, though there are reports of the epia with the pro chipset can do it.

I'm not that much up on the ilink, but my guess would be that basically you would have pretty much jumped off the bleeding edge and hoping someone will inflate the bag before you hit the ground.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Yea, I gathered that from various TV vendor web-sites, but they all imply that it's not "generic" IEEE1394 and isn't usable with anything other than particular brands/models of D-VHS decks that all speak some special i.Link control and DRM protocol (vendors usually won't promise it will work with anything other than their own decks -- imagine that).

After googling around a bit more, it sounds like the MyHD MDP-130 is exactly what I'm looking for. It includes an NTSC/ATSC/QAM tuner and demodulator along with an MPEG2 decoder with DVI output. Unfortunately the linux driver is just getting started and is currently in the colorbar stage.

Maybe I should just by a cheap SD TV and wait for flat-panel prices to come down and a linux support for something like the MDP-130. Maybe I'll by an MDP-130 and work on the driver while I watch SD TV...

Somebody really needs to make an HDTV monitor that accepts a transport stream over Firewire and composites that with an OSD input from VGA or S-Video. I should patent that idea. Oops -- too late.

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Grant