MythTV Official Community Forum

Are there external tuners that will work with portable computers to allow the computer to be the DVR?

Thanks.

Yes, lots of them.
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Category:ATSC

Thanks for the reply.

It appears that there are only a few USB devices. Only Hauppauge and OnAir are covering all the bases with ATSC by 8VSB, QAM and NTSC , and OnAir seems to be out of business (or at least AutumnWave is).

Is USB fast enough for all HD video streams?

HD video streams are going to be ~750Mbps, well outside the range of USB2.0. Fortunately, digital tuners don't give us a video stream, but just a compressed data stream at ~15Mbps. Some devices don't like having to share a hub with other devices, but a single tuner on a hub will be no issue.

Also note, networked tuners like the HDHomeRun are also available.

Thanks for the tip. That HomeRun thingy looks very interesting. It has all the tuner capabilities one would want as well as HD 1080i. Not too bad for retaiil $129.

Thanks again.

KitchM wrote:as well as HD 1080i

The tuner doesn't do 1080i, the tuner just does a data stream. Whatever the broadcaster transmits, the tuner receives and feeds to the computer. All digital tuners are identical in this regard.

You are quite right. The television displays the stream in 1080i if available in the stream.

By the way, the "SiliconDust HDHomeRun Dual HDHR4-2US HD Digital Network Attached TV Tuner Device " is available from NewEgg for less than $89.

Thanks.

Hey question for you guys. I am building a backend server for my mythtv setup and will want to do some streaming over the internet to mobile devices and maybe an offsite front end. I know this is going to want quite a bit of bandwidth. Would a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun Extend (formerly the plus) be worth it to bring down the transcoding load on my server? or should I just let the server do the transcoding jobs?

Thanks for your time.

I have an HDHomerun Connect 2 tuner box. I really like it. It seems to feed an MPEG2 stream to MythTV. It is my understanding (somebody correct me if I'm wrong) that the Extend is basically the same as the Connect, but streams in H.264 which requires roughly half the bandwidth. The big selling point for the Extend model that SiliconDust uses is that you can stream in HD to portable devices on your home network.

I want to be able to stream to a remote device as well. I previously used WMC and Remote Potato which could immediately stream a recording. It seems that the stuff for Myth needs to transcode the file before it can stream it. I'm not sure why that is since WMC recordings are basically MPEG2 which is what Myth recordings seem to be. I'd like to know why Myth can't immediately start streaming the same way Remote Potato does. Anyone able to shed some light on that?

How are you trying to stream? My RPi2 running Kodi with the myth pvr plugin works fine with liveTV and recorded programs.

I'm wanting to stream through my router and over the internet to my phone and tablets. I'm looking for the best way to do that and hoping for a way that doesn't require me to wait for a transcode to occur. Remote Potato did a good job with WMC as the backend. I've found a couple of Android apps that sort of work, but I'm looking for one to dedicate my limited time to tinkering. I'd like to get live TV streaming like that as well.

I wouldn't mind running a special piece of software on the MythTV backend if necessary. I just want it to work and be reliable and simple for the wife to use.