Multiple USB TV cards? (1 Viewer)

yuvalrakavy

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December 2, 2006
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Hi!

We are getting closer to moving to our new house (hopefully in 1.5 months, after more than 5 years of building...).

In the house, I have a Giga-Ethernet network. The vision was that everything goes (or should go) through IP. The telephony is IP based etc. Distributing Audio/Video over IP was the plan (just to be on the safe side, we also have normal coax video wiring to the rooms, hopefully never to be used...). Basically there are no TVs or Audio HIFI systems. The end points are all computers connected to an amplifer (via SPDIF) and screens/projectors (eventually about 8-12 of them)

I was planning on a central TV server about 4 years ago (and Frodo and MP team apparently read my mind somehow...). Thanks so much!. MP even has nice Hebrew support (I developed one long time ago, but it was lost, and somebody else did a great job adding it again, thanks x2).

I like a lot the fact that MP is an open system, so I would be able to deeply integrate it with the house control (software that I was writing for the last 2.5 years..)

So the time come to decide on the TV server machine configuration. Unfortunatlly in Israel there is no support for DVB/[C|S] :confused: since the cable/satellite providers are using some funkky non-standard encryption, so I will have to re-digitize the output from set-top box via the use of analog tuner cards.

I am planning to have 4-6 tuners.

a. Most of the newer machnes have PCI Express slots and very few PCI slots.

b. Most of the tuners cards are PCI, very few are PCI express...

c. I don't really need the tuner portion, since the channel selection is done by the set-top box

d. One nice solution would be to use USB based tuner cards. This get rids of the PCI/PCI express mess altogther.

Do you have any configuration or particular brand of tuner device you coould recommend for such configuration?

Is it possible to hook up 4-6 USB tuners to the same machine?

What is the pratical limit of USB tuners per machine? (I could use two machines...)

I would be greatful for any help!

Thanks,
Yuval
 

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