[plug] TV Ripping

[Simon Newton]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 11:10 +0800, Steve Baker wrote:
> >
> What goes over the USB connection?  Why don't they just move it across 
> the PCI bus?

The dual is basically the lite and usb on a single card. One PCI device
and another USB (when you connect the cable).

> 
> On another note, how much CPU do these babies use when recording two 
> channels?  I've been looking around for linux-supported DVB cards with 
> in-built MPEG encoders, which are obviously more expensive but don't hit 
> the CPU as much.  This is important for me because my media-storing PC 
> is relatively old and I don't want a brand new PC just to record 
> television.  Most DVB cards seem to recommend fairly grunty CPUs to 
> record video - if all you are doing is saving the MPEG stream off the 
> card why are so many processor cycles required?  (I know re-encoding to 
> a more compact  codec is going to be processor heavy, does it do 
> something like this whilst recording?)

Not a lot. I was originally concerned as I intended to run it in a lower
spec'ed machine. As far as I know with digital tv the card just has to
write the stream to disk, where-as with analog tv it needs to be encoded
(Hopefully someone will correct me on this)

My Athlon 700 can record 2 channels using about 25-30% cpu. It's the
playback the requires a fairly decent machine. My 1.4M laptop plays SD
back fine, but skips when playing HD content.

Hope this helps,

Simon