Re: Accessing a TV adapter via my network



On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 05:19:10PM +0000, Barry Samuels wrote:
I would like to get a Hauppauge WinTV Nova T 500 adapter which I
understand works with Linux.

Unless they've changed recently, this card should work. It has onboard
mpeg2 compression which means that you can capture on it with a pretty
low power system (important for your idea below).

...


My idea would be to assemble another computer using some spare parts
....


I'm assuming that if I assemble the said computer with the TV
adapter in it (putting it near a TV aerial socket) and can connect
wirelessly to my desktop then I could access the TV adapter from my
desktop using something like MythTV. Would such a thing be possible?

YOu can't connect to the card directly, so far as I know, unless you
build some funky interfacing client-server rig... MythTV --
yes. Install the mythtv backend on the machine with the card and
install the mythtv frontend on the box you want to watch. Should work
great, barring bandwidth issues.


I would be looking at a minimal install of Linux on the new box with
all the processing done on my desktop.

frankly there's not much processing to do with that card.. it already
compresses for you. But if you want to commercial flag, or transcode
recordings, then that does take a little horsepower. Myth allows you
to use other machines for these jobs if they also have the backend
installed. YOu can configure the backends to be master and slaves. The
master will control all the scheduling. The slaves just do what the
master says: record shows, flag commercials, etc..



This would assume that I could connect the two boxes using nothing more
than a wireless adapter in each i.e. no router. My desktop has an on-
board wireless adapter and I have two spare PCI adapters one of which I
could use in the new box. Is it possible to get two wireless adapters
to communicate in this way? Would that be fast enough to cope with the
data from the TV adapter?

I don't know.


What sort of specification for the new machine would be required? I
have a Gigabyte GA-7ZXE mainboard which takes a Socket A Athlon (which
I would have to aquire) and it takes PC-133 SDRam (which I would also
have to aquire). What's the minimum RAM I would need?

not much frankly. If all you're doing is recording shows, it's just an
mpeg2 stream taken straight to disk. My rig with two cards has 512MB
memory but hardly uses any of it. I think it would be fine with 256MB.


I would also need to aquire an IDE hard drive. What's the minimum size
I could get away with for an appropriate Debian system?

I run debian on a couple machines with old 4.3GB drives, but it's a
little tight.

TV recording
will be done on my main desktop via the network.

Well, not sure how well that works with myth. YOu could mount the
desktop drive as an NFS share, but it could be a real
bottleneck. Storage is cheap, stick a drive in the other machine and
mount it as a NFS share to your desktop. That will keep you from
getting IO bound on the recording machine. IIRC, the pvr500 has to
inputs, which means in theory, you'd be trying to cram two shows down
that pipe at once, probably not a good idea even with gigabit ethernet.


I wouldn't normally want to use a screen or keyboard after the machine
has been setup - would that cause problems when booting?

depends on the bios, but probably not.


What else haven't I thought of?

many things I'm sure.


A

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature



Relevant Pages

  • Re: Recorded TV playback
    ... I don't know much about this, but I'd be interested to know what the TV card ... and whether it is recording digital or analogue - and if it is the ... your background task uses the "CPU" other then the one that you are using ... and not the USB/IEEE drives? ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter)
  • Re: SSDs in a desktop
    ... of adapter to avoid an electrical mishap - is this true of SSDs too? ... 3.5" bay and takes two 2.5" drives. ... This currently holds a 750Gb HDD and a 64Gb SSD in my newest desktop. ... along with a class 10 SDHC card. ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)
  • Re: Old Laptop, CF for Paging File?
    ... I was thinking about putting a PCMCIA/CardBus CF adapter in one of my two CardBus slots and sticking a 1 or 2GB Compact Flash card in there. ... CF cards can be accessed by computers just like IDE disk drives. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Old Laptop, CF for Paging File?
    ... I was thinking about putting a PCMCIA/CardBus CF adapter in one of my two CardBus slots and sticking a 1 or 2GB Compact Flash card in there. ... CF cards can be accessed by computers just like IDE disk drives. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: HDdriver and CF card drive problem
    ... I don't think it's the cable, but the adapter is indeed acting ... The card reader uses a 25 pin connector, so to connect it to the 50 ... The other end of the cable from the ICD Link II goes to the Mega STe ... plan is to install some sort of IDE interface and use a Compact Flash ...
    (comp.sys.atari.st)