Building an HTPC mainly for audio but would like to record OTA HD. Did some searching here and am still cornfused. Could you all share which cards you use and what kind of problems to expect. Can you get any kind of channel guide with this kind of system?
Thanks
Hi. At the top of this board is a listing of all the offically supported tuners. For DVB-T (which is all I can comment on) I've had good success with the DVICO cards. I've experienced some minor issues using other brand cards such as slow(er) channel changing. MC doesn't offer an EPG of any kind yet. You'll need to source this via some another means.
Problems to expect? This is difficult to predict but to help minimise the typical issues, it's worth investing in a modern, fairly fast video card and to use quality decoders/filters eg, Cyberlink or Pure Video (for nVidia cards). These make the most of the hardware acceleration features on the video cards. Yes, a fast CPU will handle this task fine also but based on my experience, it's still a good idea to off-load this processing onto the VPU if possible - especially for HD streams.
You don't really state how you plan on connecting your PC to your display (or what your display type is). DVI/HDMI connections give the best results hands down.
Other than this, MC is the way to go for TV. There's still some minor fetures missing but the developers are closing the gap on this on (what seems like) a daily basis.
Good luck!
