[olug] OT: follow up on component capture and a myth/pv350 question

[Will Langford]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Benjamin Watson <bwatson1979 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Check the number of tuners available on the PVR card.  I believe the
> 150/250 have a single tuner whereas the 350 has two tuners.  You could
> grab 2 pvr150s and accomplish the same thing (record 2 channels
> simultaneously, record 1 watch 1 live, etc.).  Even if the COX S-Video
> to PVR interface doesn't work, you could feed the COX box Coax output
> to the PVR and record whatever the cable box is pumping out.  MythTV
> supports multiple PVR cards (e.g. multiple tuners), just have to set
> them up.

Every piece of typical product descriptions etc all say the 350 is a
single tuner.  I'm unsure if they're specifically saying only one coax
tuner, or if they really do mean 'record from one source at a time'.
The 500 series is the dual tuner cards... and I believe unless stated,
the 'hybrid' tuners are also single-source-at-a-time.

> Again, if you buy a Hauppage PVR, most of them come with remotes that
> work with MythTV out of the box.

Finding NIB non-thousand series cards appears to be becoming more
difficult.  And, not immediately wanting to limit my choices (ie: NIB
and MCE compatible)... experimenting with a super cheap
PVR250-blackbird-based design thing under WinMCE isn't overly evil.
If I end up liking the practicality of the setup, I'll undoubtedly
move to a MythTV client/server design and supported hardware :).

> The IR blaster on the other hand connects to a serial port on your
> computer (make sure it has one).  You tape (ther other end of) the IR

The ir blaster from the ir blaster site that... i think... Craig (?)
mentioned is pass-through / 'transparent' in design yes. It's
mentioned as one of the finer selling points.  The thing that's coming
with my card has the 3.5mm stereo plug style hookup and plugs into the
tuner card itself.  If the transmitter I'm getting is 'transparent' or
not, I'm unsure of, we'll see.

I think the major benefit (despite any slowness or other possible
issues) with ir blasting & svideo capture is that it'd allow manually
doing On Demand stuff.

My new cheap card will arrive Friday, so I'll undoubtedly get a
Schedules Direct trial/year membership thing this weekend... and give
it all a go.

-Will