With a nice 32" wide-screen LCD plain analog TV doesn't look very exciting, so I finally took the plunge and got a Silicondust HDhomerun. Setting it up was a breeze. It's supported since MythTV 0.20. Simply connect to cable and Ethernet, scan for channels (use QAM-256/cable-high) and we are in business.
Recording works, but playback ... oh, boy. That poor Celeron D 2.66 has no chance to show HD content. I went through the motions to update the Nvidia driver, update MythTV to 0.21, scoured the Internet for all the tricks to make XvMC work a bit faster, and I got almost to the point where the choppy audio stayed in sync with the choppy HD video. Bah, no fun.
In the end I replaced the Celeron with a Dual Core E2200 processor. A few data points for comparison: With the Celeron we got occasional hiccups when watching a recording while something else is being recorded, or commflag ran. With the E2200 I recorded two analog channels, and two HD channels, and watched another HD recording in parallel with no problem whatsoever. Neat.
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