[plug] PVR advice

[Mike Holland]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Derek Fountain wrote:

> > There's another issue you may not be aware of. There is no way to get
> > suitably formatted TV listing data, say as XMLTV - you currently have to

Why would that be important? Its not hard to check the TV guide and 
manually program the shows you want. Not like the US where they have 80 
channels to search, and consequently the printed TV guides have little 
info and are hard to read. What are the advantages of xmltv?

> To be honest though, the auto programme thing wasn't the main feature I was 
> looking for. I want to be able to play AVI files on the TV in the lounge, so 
> I need a PC in there.

I was thinking of putting an X-box in the lounge for playback, DVDs, mp3s.
Would that be suitable for playback?

> > If you want to be realtime encoding _and_ recording,
> > you'll need a lot of CPU power.

Mencoder just manages to do realtime divx compression on a 1.2G Duron, so 
should be able to do simultaneous record and play on any current model.

> Or a dediciated card. Hardware MPEG2 encoding is works fine on a lot of 
> hardware, and decoding is almost there.

Not neccesary these days, unless you are talking HDTV.

> What are the options for fanless CPUs these days? I've heard of exotic flower 
> shaped heatsinks which don't require fans. Anyone using one, and if so, what 
> sort of CPU?

Not quite available yet, but diamond heatsinks may soon be an option :-)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html

BTW, I just took a look at 'tvtime' after Craig's recommendation. It does 
software de-interlacing, and looks much nicer than the BTTV hardware-only 
display. Its currently only for live viewing, but mplayer/mencoder has its 
own filters.

-- 

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