[mythtv-users] System Questions

[Nick]

On 03/09/06, Chris Hoover <revoohc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I am very new to this list, and am sure you all have seen this sort of
> question often.
>
> I have a Dell PowerEdge 600SC with a 1.8GHz Celeron processor, 2 GB ram and
> 2x120GB drives, and a DVD Burner.  All of the drives are on separate IDE
> channels (I have 5 ide channels in this box :) ).
>
> Is this system powerful enough to be a MythTV box?

Plenty. I used to use a Celeron 1.3Ghz box as a slave machine with 3
capture cards for SDTV with no problems, using TV-Out to a regular TV.

> If so, what tv card
> would you suggest.  I am thinking a WinTV-pvr-350 to minimize the demands on
> the cpu.  Is there a better card?

Unless you want to use the output capability of the PVR-350 (your CPU
is plenty fast enough to decode standard definition MPEG2 video), you
might want to save money and get a PVR-150 or PVR-250. These 2 cards
have hardware MPEG2 encoding as with the -350, but no hardware video
decoding support.  You could also use a PVR-500 card if you want dual
tuner capability (it's essentially 2 PVR-150 cards on a single PCI
card).

If you do go for the PVR-350 with its excellent video output, note
that this is limited to standard definition video (720x480 in the
US/Canada) - if you want to adopt HDTV in the future you would need to
use a suitably equipped graphics card for output (and need a much
faster CPU to boot).

> I need this system to do recording from a satellite system.  We home school
> and are using the Bob Jones University HomeSat service for our school.  They
> broadcast "blocks" of classes that we then use as part of our home school.
> Each block is one weeks worth of teaching and is usually between 1.5 and 3
> hours long.  The eventual goal is to record the classes to DVD.

Make sure you use the DVD-Special-2 profile when setting up the PVR
card and your video should be recorded ready to be dropped onto DVD
with no further re-encoding required.

Nick

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