[mythtv-users] mythfrontend on cheap hw ;-)

[Cory Papenfuss]

> Hi, 
> I want to make mythfrontend/diskless on old hardware
> Whats the minimum cpu speed, ram  for mythfrontend ?
> Celeron 400, 700 Mhz , 64, 128 RAM , geforce mx4 ?
> Any suggestion?
> _______________________________________________

 	My first mythbox prototype was a BP6 (dual celeron 300's 
overclocked to 450MHz).  It worked OK, but at the time I only had a 
bt878-based card.  The best I could capture was about 320x480 and that 
took about 85% of one CPU to do the encoding.... about 30% of the other to 
do the playing IIRC.

 	If you have an MPEG2 capture card, you could probably get away 
with a single Celeron 400 with 128MB RAM.  It may hit swap once in awhile 
and it'll probably burn up 50% of the CPU for playback.

 	If you don't have an MPEG2 capture card, (say you've got a 
bt878-based one), you'll need probably close to a 1GHz machine minimum.

 	One other noteworthy point... the PVR-250 I initially bought 
wasn't even *seen* by the BP6.  Something about PCI revision being too old 
on the board.  If you try to run too old of hardware you may run into the 
same thing.


-Cory

  --

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* Cory Papenfuss                                                        *
* Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student               *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University                   *
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