[mythtv-users] Cheap Possible Frontend

[Stef Coene]

On Tuesday 09 May 2006 01:07, Brian Wood wrote:
> On May 8, 2006, at 3:19 PM, David Whyte wrote:
> > On 5/9/06, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> >> But I'm still wondering if you can get decent MPEG-4 playback. That
> >> requires more CPU horsepower than MPEG-2. Unless it can do MPEG-4
> >> than I'll stick with my MediaMVP.
> >
> > I used to do DivX on my PII 300 Windows PC.  I would have thought
> > 833's would cut it just fine (but I am no expert).
>
> . Hmmm...
>
> That's a good data point.
>
> I have an old Dell PIII 500 Mhz. laptop. Guess I'll just have to try
> that and see how it does.
I used a compaq 500 Mhz once as frontend.  I had to use mpeg4 because mpeg2 
saturated the pcmcia bus.  The bottleneck was not the cpu, but the pcmcia bus 
that could only handle not more than 1mb/s.
I discarded the laptop because I couldn't get the tv-out working like it 
should be.  Sometimes it works, sometimes not and sometimes it was garbled.


Stef