Question about encoding for HTPC PVR's

[jmcoreymv]

Let's say I wanted to build a HTPC PVR using MythTV for example. If I wanted to record my captured programs in MPEG4/DivX/whatever, would I be better off getting a tuner card that does not have hardware mpeg-2 compression? If I got a card with hardware encoding then it seems like the cpu would have to decode the mpeg-2 stream and then re-encode it in the desired format requiring even more clock cycles.

 

[Raduque]

My gut instinct says a software-encoding tuner would be best.

 

[jmcoreymv]

Thats what I was thinking, but I thought it was also possible that the tuner card drivers could tell the card to just grab the frames and not encode them.