[MEncoder-users] tv tuner card suggestions?

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 08:54:26AM +0100, Dieter wrote:
> > it has to be a pci card,
> 
> There are USB tuners, Ethernet tuners and probably Firewire tuners.
> These don't use up a valuable PCI slot.  Newer computers have fewer
> and fewer PCI slots, due to having some PCIe slots instead.  And
> USB/Ethernet/Firewire tuners can be used with a laptop.  If you go
> this route you can have more than 2 tuners.

USB etc. probably requires a lot more cpu. I always get huge cpu load
from using usb storage devices, and tv capture has similar or higher
bandwidth requirements.

> > currently i only have analogue tv,
> 
> Are you sure?

Why do you interrogate the original poster like this? US essentially
does not have digital TV.

> Many countries have digital broadcasts.  In the US, the
> analog broadcasts are scheduled to end 2009-02-17.

I'm very doubtful that this will happen since no one has it except
videophiles and such and there don't even seem to be digital
broadcasts in many places. Also the crappy signal degredation will
mean that many people who could receive analog TV (far from the
station) will be unable to get digital TV at all.

> > i want it to include an encoder on the card, so my cpu can be left in
> > peace
> 
> Note that watching a recording requires decoding, which also requires a lot
> of CPU, or decoding hardware.

This is misleading. Watching requires trivially small CPU load
compared to encoding (like 100mhz vs 1.5ghz). In fact my experience is
that just moving uncompressed video across the PCI bus is slower than
decoding the same video and moving it across the video bus (AGP/etc.)!

Rich