[mythtv-users] HDTV Hardware requirements

[Yan Seiner]

Matt Jordan wrote:

>Doe the backend need to be that fast to serve HD?  Could a "low end"
>backend still serve HDTV content as long as the front-end has fast AGP
>or PCI-X graphics and such?
>  
>
 From my limited experience, the backend doesn't have to be much....

I have a SMP 1 GHz pentium III server w/ about 1 GB RAM.  Nothing fancy, 
but it has gobs of relatively fast disks (100 GB of SCSI RAID and 400 GB 
of IDE RAID, one drive / channel) with striping on the critical partitions.

I also have a pcHDTV card and a PVR-150 card.  When doing catpure, the 
mythbackend runs at about 6% CPU.

I did have to bump the priority of the myth backend to -19 to make sure 
it was first in line, and I run a low-latency kernel, but this machine 
also runs MySQL, my website, commercial rsync, and a few other things, 
so it's pretty heavily loaded.

Right now both CPUs are pegged at 100% due to transcode jobs, yet I can 
still watch live analog TV while recording HDTV.

So no, you don't need heavy hardware on the backend.

I can't watch live HDTV due to the frontend blowing up - something about 
graphics hardware limitations.  I'll build up a front end with a NVidia 
FX5200 card and see if that helps later this week.

--yan