[mythtv-users] Possible to run this setup?

[David Brodbeck]

Chad wrote:
>> Do you think the frontend will run with 256 MByte RAM too?
>>     
>
> That's really pushing it.  I don't give any of my systems less than
> 512, and typically go with 1GB to ensure no memory issues arise.
>   

For what it's worth, I have a machine running the frontend *and* backend
with 256 megabytes of RAM (minus 8 megs for video RAM) and it works
fine.  More memory would be desirable because Linux uses any "extra" RAM
as disk cache, though.

The system is a VIA miniITX box, with a 1 GHz Nehemiah CPU.  It has a
single tuner with MPEG2 hardware encoding.  MPEG2 playback (at 480x480)
used roughly 50% CPU before I enabled the playback acceleration on the
VIA chipset; after enabling that, it's less, more like 30% if I remember
right.  Two caveats: This is analog TV, and I'm not doing transcoding.

I'm actually surprised how little CPU it takes to record and watch
standard analog TV, once you have a hardware encoder.