[mythtv-users] PII 450 system

[Ray Olszewski]

At 07:46 AM 6/9/2003 -0400, Simon Martin-Dye wrote:

>I am trying to build a cheap MythTV system out of my discarded computer 
>components.  I have a PII 450 with 384MB ram.  Do you guys recommend using 
>the PVR-250 since it has hardware decoding for live TV? What TV out card 
>should I use - does it matter?

Since I do not use a PVR-250, I can neither recommend it or discourage you 
from using it. From what others say here on the list, it works fine, but 
the ivtv driver is needs is still sufficiently alpha to pose some 
challenges. But read the other messages here about it and form your own 
opinion.

I can tell you that a PII-450 has too little CPU power to work at all well 
with any capture card that passes the encoding work on to the CPU, like the 
common bttv-driver cards. (I actually tried this with a Celeron 566 and a 
bttv card, just as an experiment ... I got something on the order of 20% 
frame loss, even with 320x240 encoding.)

The best TV-out cards seem to be the recent nVidia cards, which qork quite 
reliably with nVidia's proprietary X driver (and associated kernel module). 
The one I catually use here and like is the "GeForce4 MX440-SE AGP Video 
Card with TV-out".

I'm assuming that this mobo has a suitable AGP slot ... not inevitable with 
so old a system. If not ... I just bought a PCI-slot nVidia card as a cheap 
($US20) closeout, but I haven't tried it yet. If you do need PCI, please 
post a followup, and I'll report after I get to the test (probably not for 
a few days yet).