HDTV DVB-T2 cards and MythTV

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Has anybody on here used HDTV PCIe cards with MythTV?

[nelz]

I've been using one for a number of years, it's a TBS 6280. Driver installation is a bit of a pain because they are out of kernel drivers. The only other DVB-T2 card I tried also used out of kernel drivers. I'd be interested in finding a kernel-supported card.

Apart from the driver issue, the card works very well.

http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/TBS6280

[wyliecoyoteuk]

How about encrypted content?
I have been told that some freeview channels are encrypted. Is that a problem with the main ones?
(BBC,ITV,CH4 etc)

[nelz]

AFAIK the only encrypted ones are those that need a subscription, like UK Gold and the ones that only broadcast after midnight

The mainstream channels all work fine.

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Not a problem for me then

[Ram]

Not a problem for me then

In bed by midnight then

[nelz]

That's why he needs to record

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Nelz, what sort of CPU do you use with the TBS card?
I have installed it ina min-itx with a Kabini quad core APU, but I am having some issues with stutter on HD.
I have ordered a new case with room for a low profile card instead of using a ribbon cable riser.
Would the catalyst drivers cure that do you think?

[nelz]

It's an old Core2duo chips, but the box is a backend only, stuffed full of tuners and hard rives and in a place where the noise doesn't matter. The front end in my lounge is a Nettop, also a few years old, running the Nvidia graphics drivers on an Ion chipset, playback is stutter-free.

[wyliecoyoteuk]

For some reason the 6280 specifies 2.6ghz multicore processor.
I thought that the offload to the gpu on the kabini would mean it would be ok, even though it was only 2.05ghz

[nelz]

That's probably a requirement of the Windows software. All the card is doing is demuxing the DVD stream and dumping it to disk. The real CPU work is in decoding and plating that stream. The CPU on my backend, running the 6280 plus a couple of DVD-T cards, is

Code: Select all

vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 15
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 15
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual  CPU  E2200  @ 2.20GHz
stepping        : 13
cpu MHz         : 2203.000
cache size      : 1024 KB

Hardly cutting edge.

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Thanks.
The Kabini is 2.05GHz, Quad core, with a Radeon R3 8400 GPU builtin, I put in 4GB of low latency ram, so I thought it should handle it.

TDP is 25W!


And they are cheap, cpu + motherboard came to £65

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Applied the proprietary Catalyst drivers, HD smooth now

Just for info, also works well with Win8.1 and the LAV codecs (doing a Windows article for another mag).

so it looks like you were right.