[mythtv-users] Low End MythTV

[Brad Templeton]

On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 10:38:00PM -0700, Blammo wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 09:00:19 -0800 (PST), Andrew Lynch <lynchaj at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > There are links to other "low end" MythTV projects
> > included and a discussion of my project.  I'd like to
> > include other peoples low end MythTV projects so reply
> > here or send me a message offline.
> 
> I just built a low-end machine for a co-worker. By Low-end I mean what
> I would consider the be the bare minimum. Her own hardare, P2-300. I
> put 512M of my own ram into it, and we bought a PVR-250 the lowest end
> PCI Nvidia card we could get XvMC in. (Think it was an MX4000).

The MX440 should also work.
> 
> Overall, the playback and recording are flawless at 720x480 MPEG2.
> Commercial flagging takes roughly 8 hours for 1 hr  of video. Menus,
> etc, are slow to come up, drop off.

Actually, I'm surprised it is this poor.  I built a system for
somebody with an Athlon 750mhz chip, only 2.5x faster than your 300mhz
chip.   Yet it commercial flags an hour of TV in under 40 minutes.

I am not recording at 720x480 though.  You don't want to record at
720x480 unless you are trying to burn DVDs.   General wisdom is that
NTSC doesn't really send much more than 352 pixels of width, 480 is
certainly adequate and 680 is overkill for when you want to squeeze
out the absolute most.  IIRC, DVDs work from 352 and 720.

More to the point, as I learned on this very list, you will get a better
quality recording from 352x480 at the same bitrate (say 4 megabits as
a common rate) than you would from 720x480.  Hard to say, but you might
get a better quality recording from 352x480 at 4 megabits than from
720x480 at 5 megabits, because the 720 is throwing in wasted information,
which is somewhat compressed but not perfectly.

I presume you are using the xvmc to play this video.  The system I built
also had an mx4000 but was able to play the video without xvmc, which
didn't work well at the time I built it (0.16).