[mythtv] playback quality

[Allen T. Gilliland IV]

I've got my mythtv setup and running normal now, but
the quality is not all that great.  I am using my
older machine which has:

AMD T-bird 1200Mhz
GeForce 2 MX 400
SoundBlaster AWE64 ISA :(
WinTV-dbx 401
IBM 25GB UDMA HD @ 14.81MB/s
Gentoo Linux 2.4.19
rtjpeg codec

I am wondering how well this machine should perform. 
My picture when watching tv on my monitor is not all
that great ... I am going to assume this is the fault
of my gf2 MX.  However the card should be more than
capable of doing 60fps on any resolution with better
rates than a tv.  Would a radeon or gf3/4 serve me
better?

Its obvious my sound card is old and junkie ... but
its for testing right now.  I would like to get one of
the audiophile cards ... what is the driver support
like in linux?  is it easy to get these cards running
and configured using alsa in linux?

I also know the tv card is a bit cheap ... but it
should do the job right?  Will a better tv card help
anything?

And finally the processor and HD.  Most people said
that a 1GHz or more machine should work for even the
mpeg4 encoding ... and while my machine isn't blazing
... it should be fast enough right?  The HD is slow
and I am planning on adding a newer drive to do all
the recording for mythtv ... is 14.81MB/s why things
are going slow?

Hopefully the answers will compile nicely into a
"System Recommendations" doc.

-- Allen

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