What TV Card?

nukem996 · l33t Joined: 13 Nov 2003 Posts: 776

Ive done a bunch of research on what TV cards but they all have benefits and drawbacks so im asking the Gentoo community to help me decide which card to get. Im going to college in Philedelphia and do not want to buy a new TV since I already have a great monitor(Dell 2405FPW). My college gives me free cable and since im in a city I can get HDTV over the air waves. I was thinking about getting an HDTV tuner but there arent that many channels that are HD(yet), I cannt hook it up to digal cable without using a box(when im home), there is no hardware mpeg encoder, it will use alot of my CPU, and the recorded files will be huge. I thought about getting a normal TV card but normal TV looks like crap on my monitor since I run at 1920x1200. What card do you guys think I should get? Does anyone know if there will be a hardware HDTV card out soon?

Thanks,

nuke

tkdfighter · Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 1:35 pm Post subject:

Well, HDTV is already encoded in some format (DVB uses MPEG2), so you won't have to do any encoding at all unless you want Xvid or the like. I've never heard of any MPEG2 to MPEG4 hw encoders though.

BTW, nice monitor

nukem996 · l33t Joined: 13 Nov 2003 Posts: 776

Well what im really worried about is that since the vast majorty of channels will still be NTSC that will suck up my CPU while im watching NTSC.

tkdfighter · Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 12:44 pm Post subject:

If the broadcast is digital, it'll already be compressed. Even if it were analog and you had to compress it via software first, a P3 should have no problems doing that. Check out the MythTV documentation for more infos on the topic.

nukem996 · l33t Joined: 13 Nov 2003 Posts: 776

Thanks for the useful page. I just wish there was an HDTV with an mpeg encoder for NTSC. Now at least I know what my option really are.