[mythtv-users] Newbie questions...

Gavin Haslett gavin at nodecaf.net
Wed May 25 11:32:30 UTC 2005


As I recall, most of the DMA issues with VIA chipsets were with older
mobo/CPU conversations. I don't know if more recent chipsets suffer from
that, but I would doubt it. It's not a huge problem as Linux tends to
just work around it.

I was part of the conversation you were referring to, my system's an OLD
Athlon 800 which I'll be upgrading to a Celeron 1.8 (400FSB) this
weekend. My problems LOOK for all the world like a DMA bug, and the
whole MythTV box seems awfully slow compared to my similarly spec'ed
PIII-933 (running FC3 also), so I'm hoping I can at least eliminate that
possibility as well as getting a much more powerful frontend/backend
combo.

Technologically there's very little difference between the 150 and 250
that hasn't already been mentioned here. However, as you're a newbie I'd
say go with the 250 as it's by far the most common and well supported
card. I use it myself with an NVIDIA video card, so I can use the 250
for encoding, the NV with XvMC for hardware decode of the MPEG2 streams
and still come in around 25-30% CPU utilization even on this older
hardware. I'll be interested to see what I can do with the Celeron.
<grin> 

-----Original Message-----
From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org
[mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org] On Behalf Of Ben Bargabus
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 10:03 PM
To: MagicITX; Discussion about mythtv
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Newbie questions...

<snip>
> 1. I've not had trouble with the VIA DMA problem.  I seem to recall 
> some talk that it could be an FC3 on VIA problem.  Maybe I shouldn't 
> say that since I can't recall specifics of the conversation.  YMMV


FC3 as in Fedora?  I'm a debian guy, I assume then that would be fine.


> 2. You don't need a 350 on the backend.  The decoding capability is a 
> frontend thing.


I kind of thought that but wanted to check.  What then is the difference
between the 150 and 250?  I went to their web page and it wasn't very
clear.


Thank you for your input!



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