I'm tempted with buying a proper encoding card to use with MythTV.

I'm thinking of buying a new motherboard with built in MPEG2 decoder like the EPIA boards.

This then got me thinking about buying a DVB card. These allow MythTV to save the raw MPEG2 stream to disk so I'm not loosing any quality by converting an analogue composite connect from my FreeView box.

It also means that I don't actually need the FreeView box either, giving me less remote controls to worry about and the MythTV box turns into a proper tv watching centre!

Has anyone tried out these DVB cards with MythTV - whats the CPU performance like? As I'd like to keep a lowest powered CPU as possible.

I like the idea of receiving MPEG2 signal over the air and then replaying this through the MPEG2 decoder on the motherboard - I'd assume little CPU power would be needed to do this as its all disk I/O?

Anyone like to point me in the right direction or tell me it wont work?!?

Regards

I too would be very interested in the answer to this if anyone knows?

well I would search over at the mythtv mailing lists. here

this thread might be of interest. It doen't help you with how but lets you know what is supported, and where the drivers are located.

forums.viaarena.com has a Linux group that has discussions about the EPIA-M setup. I have an Epia-M 10000 with an Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250. I must confess I've still had some problems, mostly because I haven't had that much time to throw at this. But all the drivers exist, and others have made it work. I would love to see full Epia-M support in KnoppMyth!

Well my guess would be that full epia-m support requires special kernel patches, and I'm not sure how much they affect other areas of the kernel, for example I know that the via has a special patched v4l but does it affect other v4l devices like bttv. at any rate it's not something that can just be thrown in it would require a good bit of development and testing, however it is very intreaguing. One of these days I may have some extra cash to get one of these and work with it. If so I will contribute anything I find back to the project, however I imagine that the support will be in there long before I manage to scrounge up any extra cash lol.