[vdr] Re: choosing a FF card

[Ian Molton <spyro@f2s.com>]

Tony Houghton wrote:

>  So the CLE266's MPEG decoder can't do field parity?
No thats not what I said - I think the *tv encoder* chip cant generate 
an interrupt and tell software which field (up or down) is on display.

> That's poor. Have you got a spare PCI slot?

Not at present - but I do want to investigate the possibility of USB DVB 
inputs, which would free up the PCI slot. The idea of a matrox G450 with 
TV out sounds promising (no issues there for divx, and can support 
field-parity properly). can the G450 do hardware assisted DVD playback?

> Your best option may be to use a DXR3 for TV
> and other MPEG 1/2, and your CLE266 for DivX etc, with a SCART switch
> box. I don't think interlacing is ever used on anything but MPEG2.
I'm going to lose enough quality due to my TV only having composite in, 
so I'd ratehr not introduce (another) device in the signal path.

Hm. I guess my next question is going to be...

a) What USB DVB tuners are 1) cheap and 2) reliable
b) I want two DVB-T tuners and possibly one or two DVB-S. Can this be 
got in one device (or can I get, say, two DVB-T in one device) ?
c) work on linux without ugly hacks
d) dont lock up constantly
e) am I right in thinking that typically a MUX has a data rate of 
~22Mbit/s in which case 4 tuners on USB2.0 should be ~88MBit/s and thus 
work OK (cripes, I wonder if the CLE266/VIA combo will be able to handle 
that kind of data rate? of course, the real data rate will be 
~8-10Mbit/s if I only work on 4 streams at once, which is more manageable)

basically I want to be able to tune any MUX and record any MUX on DVB-T 
simultaneoulsly, and potentially later I want to do the same with a 
steerable DVB-S setup.