[mythtv-users] Performance from a different perspective

[Nick]

On 25/01/06, Justin The Cynical <cynical at penguinness.org> wrote:

> IMO, for a remote FE, a "fast" Celeron will work fine for SD broadcast.

I'm running a slave BE/FE system using a Celeron 1.3GHz w/256MB RAM
(Intel 815 chipset). Video is TV-Out from an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro. This
is with a PVR-150 and 2xDVB cards. No problems at all with playback or
recording (think I've had 3 simultaneous recordings locally and
watched another over the network). This is running MythTV 0.18.1 on
FC4 (2.6.14). The HDD is a newish 200GB drive after my IBM Deathstars
finally clicked off this mortal coil.

When video is SD MPEG-2 and using hardware capture/DVB cards, I really
can't see why Celerons (or other similar CPUs) get a bad press. (This
system also plays XVID/MP4 encoded video fine). I remember watching
fullscreen DVD on old PIII-450 systems with no problems! It seems (at
least to me) having read this list for quite some time, that the
'only' super CPU intensive tasks are HD playback, then transcoding,
commflagging, and some mythmusic visualisations e.g. Goom. For a
SD-based machine with little use of the above, I'd say dig out your
old bits and see how things go before buying new.

Nick