[mythtv-users] Baby Steps 2

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 02:50:25PM -0500, mythtvster wrote:
>    I am looking for advice on a system I have laying around that I
>    would like to use as a PVR. I have an old Dell Dimension Pentium
>    III collecting dust that I would like to upgrade to use solely as a
>    PVR. It only has an onboard video card and 128MB RAM so this would
>    have to be upgraded correct? Since it is only a PCI board what
>    video card(s) are recommended? Do I need a video card to encode and
>    decode or will one card suffice? I would like to hook this up to a
>    40" LCD via component or HDMI/DVI if at all possible - do they even
>    make a vanilla PCI card (with Linux drivers available) that will
>    handle this? I plan on bulking the memory up to 512 (it's max),
>    will this be sufficient? Would this system be OK for a backend? I
>    do not not want to dump a whole lot into it (including time) if the
>    core system is not good enough. Thanks in advance.

My reaction is that if you're that hardward-constrained, make sure you
buy a hardware-compression tuner card, like the Hauppauge PVR's.  

If you can use HD-15 to go to your monitor, then you won't need to
replace the onboard video, I don't think. 512MB ought to be fine;
my sister has a KT6V based system on an Athlon XP 2500+ with three
Hauppauge tuners, and we're getting by ok on 512.

You should be able to run that as a combined back/front, if you pick
the right tuner (and possibly, even if you don't, but Hauppauge's and
equivalent are cheap enough today that the labor you might need to
spend otherwise isn't worth it).

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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