[mythtv-users] Hardware resrouces required for s/w encode

[Fred Squires]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Michael PARKER <michael.parker at st.com> wrote:
> Nick,
>
>> Have you already considered and ruled out the Huappauge HVR-1300?
>>
>> This card has onboard DVB-T and hardware MPEG-2 analog capture, so
>> unless you are seriously thinking of using satellite in the future, it
>> may be a less expensive alternative. One other thing to bear mind is
>> that the HVR-4000 (and possibly the -1300 with its analog and DVB-T)
>> has mutually exclusive digital tuners, so that it can't simultaneously
>> record DVB-T and DVB-S/S2.
>
> Good point - many thanks. My intention was to give the MythBox as much functionality as possible at
> time of build, precluding the possibility of not being able to buy PCI/PCIex1/?? tuner cards in the
> future, having a motherboard without the necessary slots etc. and being stuck with a non-upgradeable
> box.
>
> Do you have any views on the ability of a modern quad core like the X4 605e to cope with the
> overhead of encoding the incoming analog stream into RTjpeg/MPEG-4?
>
> Assuming that the codec(?) is multi-threaded, it should be a no brainer. My concern arises if the
> codec is only able to run on a single core and one 2.3GHz core isn't man enough.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mike

You don't have to worry, when I started using MythTV I was using a
software encoder on an 800Mhz Athlon (technically a 1.2 Ghz under
clocked to 800, because it would crash otherwise) and it worked just
fine.