Tuesday, April 26, 2005

DVB or analog?

It occurs frequently on the PVR mailing lists that someone thinking of setting up a PVR box (like MythTV) asks the list for advice on a particular setup. And, almost as frequently, the person states something like "I will only get one TV tuner card, since I will not need more than one..". The responce to that statement is always something like "Yeah, right. Yo will change your mind."

Initially, when I started the MythTV build, I was one of these fools thinking that one tuner card should be enough. Now, I know how naive I was. Of course, You coudl get by on just one card, but after a whil, when the whole family starts to acctually use the box, confclicts are bound to happen.
So, like so may MythTV users before me, I am researching the best buy for a second TV card.

In comes the issue of whether to get a digial or an analog card. Sweden, where I live, will stop having anlog TV in 2008, and therefore I seems like a good idea to have a look at digital options rather than a more expensive analog card with a MPEG2 encoder. However, the number of free DVB-T channels in Sweden is rather limited. All but one of them fits into the same multiplex. Also, the channels that we most frequently record from is not included in the free channels.
The option would of course be to get a DVB-C card and use it with the digital cable service that we are supposed to be able to get in out building. However, my guess is that this would mean that we would have to use a CI interface for the subscription card, and then we would HAVE to watch live TV through MythTV. Moving hte card around is not a very good idea since it would surely be in the wrong place come recording time. :-)

I don't know what we should do...

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Appearance is everything..

Yesterday, I stumbled uppon a new theme for MythTV that have not (at least I think) been mentioned on the mythtv-users mailing list or on any of the other fora that deals with MythTV. I really like it, so I would like to promote the use of it... it is a change from the sometimes much too serious MythTV standard themes. Have a look:




You can download it from this site.