I am looking for advice on capture cards for my system. I had started out with two Airstar HD5000-PCI cards, these worked great for the HD but I have since discovered that my cable provider is encrypting the SD channels. I realize now that the Airstar cards alone do not provide the complete solution. My problem is that my Asus M2NPV-VM board only has two PCI slots and I am struggling to find a combination of cards/boxes which will give the functionality I need:

I want to be able to capture any combination of two SD/HD channels at the same time, i.e. SD+HD. HD+HD, SD+SD

My ideal capture card would feature:

HD capture using clear QAM
NTSC analogue capture (from cable input) with hardware MPEG encoding
PCI or PCI-e

I managed to find a card which does all of the above, and is dual-tuner but unfortunately it looks like there is no Linux support and very unlikely there will be any in the future. The card in question is an AVerMedia AverTV M780 ..

http://www.aver.com/mpd/combopcie.html

The other option I looked at was to use two USB tuner boxes for the NTSC analogue and keep my two Airstar cards for HD but this would mean having to hook my cable up to two additional inputs, which I would prefer not to do.

I came across the pcHDTV HD-5500 which can do clear QAM 64 & 256 and analogue NTSC but it isn’t clear from the specs if it does hardware MPEG2 encoding for the analogue NTSC. I am worried that my AMD 3500 AM2 system is not going to have enough horsepower to be capturing HD, viewing HD on my screen and recording NTSC analogue on the other tuner all at the same time. From the fact that the audio comes out of a separate jack I am assuming it doesn’t do h/w MPEG encoding.

Also, I cannot figure out how I am supposed to input the two audio cables (one from each card) into my single aux input of my soundcard!

I have seen mention on a Linux user forum of a Kworld Atsc-110, is anyone familiar with that card?

http://www.kworldcomputer.com/product/d ... sc_110.htm

I did notice mention however of “No commercial skipping with HD�, but I am not sure if that is a limitation of the application software which comes with the card or a restriction of the card itself.

The other thing I am trying to factor in is the remote .. I have a StreamZap remote which came bundled with my Airstar card, but if I replace my Airstar card with another type of capture card will it still work with MythTV?

Given that I have the following slots available can someone suggest a combination of cards/boxes which would achieve what I am looking for:

2 x PCI slots
2 x PCi-E x1 slots
1 x PCI-E x16 slot
3 x USB sockets
LAN
2 x firewire sockets

I have considered the HD Homerun, as that is dual tuner but doesn't do analogue NTSC and as far as can figure out I would still end up with four cable connectors to hang on my cable. The neater solution would be to have two pcHDTV HD-5500 cards but if it doesn’t do h/w encoding for the analogue NTSC then I think I will run out of horsepower. Also, one problem I see with the HD-5500 solution is that it outputs audio for the analogue NTSC on a separate audio jack and I don’t see how I would input the audio from two cards into my sound card’s single input.

I have found the following cards which look interesting, some of which unfortunately don’t have Linux support and some I have not been able to find out yet:

AVerMedia AverTV M780 (not supported in Linux)
V-Box Catseye 164e (have read of windows users having problems with this card, not sure about Linux support)
Hauppauge HVR-1600 (apparently Hauppauge shipped this card in lieu of the PVR-150 over Christmas but users found it would not work under Linux)

<edit> I have read that the HVR-1600 doesn't do QAM, only OTA so I have to cross that off my list.
<edit> Another likely contender, the Hauppauge HVR-950 (a USB2 HD+SD analogue tuner) bites the dust as it doesn't do QAM.

Thanks for your help,

Kevin

I heard back from pcHDTV about the analogue NTSC capture capability, apparently it can dma across PCI as well as output over the audio cable. Here is what they had to say:


"The easiest way is to use an audio cable connected to your sound card but the HD-5500 also uses the cx88-audio driver that can dma the audio across the pci bus to applications that can used it. I do not know for sure if mythtv supports both audio device types so you should check the mythtv forum also.

For testing we use tvtime to select a channel followed by arecord -D hw:1,0 -r 48000 -c 2 -f S16_LE | aplay -
Which grabs the digital from the HD-5500 card and plays it back.

When using the audio cable the sound card digitizes the audio and it is passed to an application such as mythtv which then encodes it in the mpeg stream for recording. With the cx88-audio driver the HD-5500 card digitizes the audio and then this driver passes it to an application such as mythtv which would then encode it"


I am trying to find out from the MythTV mailing list if MythTV supports the dma of the audio but if anyone in this forum knows the answer please let me know. Again, the reason why I want to do it this way rather than use the audio cable is that I would have two cards, hence two cables but only one input to my sound card.

Also, if anyone knows typically what CPU% it takes to encode SD analogue NTSC to MPEG2 please let me know as this is another concern which I have about this card,

thanks,

Kevin

I think your best option is a HDhomerun and a PVR-500 (Make sure to get a type A with the large phillips tunner)

The pvr-500 only needs one input from your cable to feed both tunners. If you look at a picture of the card you will see two but one is for FM and the other for TV.

Going this route will also leave you with extra pci slots and the HDHomerun is motherboard independant so when you can no longer get MBs with pci slots the HDHomerun will still work.

'databin1', can you tell me more about the 'type A' PVR-500, do I need to get this version because of some quality or incompatibility issue with the non-type A versions?

(I would just like to know in case I have difficulty finding the Type A board.)

HDhomerun looks like a good solution but I still end up with three cable connections. I don't know if this is actually a problem however but it seems like a good idea to keep the load on my cable down to a minimum.

I am not sure how the splitter works, in that what load would be seen on the cable, perhaps I am worrying about nothing. Perhaps it is not the load that is the problem but rather the signal quality seen by each tuner.

Good point about still being able to use the HDhomerun when I can't get a motherboard with PCI slots, for the same reason I started out looking for USB devices.

It is a shame there is not a dual HD tuner which only has one cable input.

One thing I need to look into before buying the HDhomerun is whether I can still use the ethernet connection on my system now that I am using wireless for my main connection to the internet. I know it should be possible but this whole wireless networking thing turned out to be bit of a nightmare, I don't want to end up breaking that.

Kevin

The type A uses phillips tunners where the Type b uses samsung. The philips tunners seem to work much better and don't seem to have the issues the Type Bs have.

Here is a post on a different forum that covers the issue.

http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/showthread.php?t=33675

It is a forum for windows users but the issues with the hardware apply to linux as well.

thanks for the info and pointer to the discussion snapstream forum. It looks like it's going to be a challenge to make sure I get a Philips tuner version. I wonder if Hauppauge have switched back to using the Samsung now or whether they are still claimig it is a software thing.

BTW does anyone have any idea on how important it is to do the MPEG2 encoding on the SD capture card? Without this is my CPU going to be struggling?

(I still haven't ruled out using the pcHDTV HD-5500 to capture the NTSC analogue and do the encoding in software)

thanks,

Kevin

Hardware MPEG-2 encoding on the capture card helps if you have an older CPU or want to record and watch two shows simultaneously. Having the encoder card doing the encoding takes very little CPU cycles, leaving more room for the cpu to perform other tasks.

As far as splitting the cables for multiple tuners and tvs, I have mine split once for TV and Internet, then the TV side gets split through a 1 to 4 splitter/amp. The only trick is to make sure you split the internet side before the amp. If you don't use cable for internet, then it shouldn't matter. I also have a filter before the amp that removes the lower frequencies used for the internet upstream. Without the filter, the lower channels, 2 and 3, were getting some interference from the upstream internet signals being amplified by the splitter. I think my amp was about $20 and the filter was $8.

_________________
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P4 1.3 - 384MB, 250GB HD, HD5000AV, PVR150 non MCE
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Hopefully I can help answer some of your questions. While I don't have a HD-5500, in my researching of HD tuners I have read on multiple occasions that It's NTSC (analog) tuner capabilities aren't really all that great. I'd say if you plan on doing any volume of analog recording you will want to get an MPEG2 based card like the PVR-500 / PVR-150.

I'm not really sure why you are so hung up on having 2 vs. 4 vs. 10 different inputs. You do realize that a dual tuner card simply has a splitter built into the card. Granted you probably don't lose quite as much RF power with an internal split as an external split, it is still splitting the signal to each tuner weather the split is internal or external. If you reach a point that you have so many splits that you find you don't have a strong enough signal on some tuners then you can purchase an RF amplifier to boost you signal. Better yet you could purchase a distribution amplifier which is made for the sole purpose of "distributing" a single source (ie. your cable connection) to multiple inputs. I've seen 4 output distribution amps sell for under $20.

I presently have a PVR-500 (with phillips tuners) and am extremely happy with it. I plan to add an HDHomerun in the very near future as well. As long as your running a very recent version of Mythtv (that included support for the HDHomerun) there simply isn't any downside to it. It is truely an amazing device. I really think Datobin1 is spot on when he recommends getting an HDHomerun plus a PVR-500.

Best of luck to you!

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

thanks to all of you for your help.

I will try to find a Type A pvr-500, so far it looks like my local retailers have the Type B. I will keep looking. At the end of that Snapstream thread it talks about the Type C which is better than the Type B but the Type A still sounds like it is the best tuner.

As regards being hung up about the number of connections .. I was just being cautious. I have read of picture quality problems with some tuners related to signal strength (sometimes too low, sometimes too high). I thought it prudent to try to keep the connections to a minimum. It is a good point though that the dual tuner cards use a splitter inside anyway.

The exception is cards like the pcHDTV HD-5500 which has a single input, but receives both QAM and analogue. Two pcHDTV cards would only present two loads to the cable. Anyway, from what you tell me I don't need to worry about this so that's good news.

If I can't find a Type A PVR-500 I may have to consider again the possibility of using the HD-5500 for the analogue NTSC, I do think that the PVR-500 is the better solution though. It is probably going to give me better video quality, and definitely use less CPU.

If anyone has experience of the HD-5500 for analogue please let me know. That way it will help me decide once and for all whether I should leave it on my list. It is surprising that no one has commented on the HD-5500 considering it was supposed to have been developed specifically for Linux, maybe it is not as popular as I imagined. Or maybe I just did a poor job of phrasing my questions which I started thread.

Kevin