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<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 18/02/2008, <b class="gmail_sendername">Sarah Hayes</b> <<a href="mailto:sarah@sarahhayes.is-a-geek.net">sarah@sarahhayes.is-a-geek.net</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Guan Xuefei wrote:<br>> Hello folks, I am new to MythTV, I have a old linux box (266MHz CPU),<br>> I would like to choose a USB DVB-T box, and It should have the<br>
> hardware encoder because the poor CPU, I checked the mythtv website,<br>> and it takes me to here,<br>> <a href="http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-T_USB_Devices">http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-T_USB_Devices</a>, a lot of<br>
> devices for me to choose, If anyone have ever use those devices,<br>> please give me some advices. Thanks.<br>><br>> Guan,<br>Whilst, yes, DVB cards require very little to no CPU overhead, I'd be<br>dubious of using a USB one on such a beastie.<br>
<br>A lot of them I've encountered seem to be USB2 not USB1 or 1.1 (and<br>yes, I've encountered old boards that were pre-usb spec with what<br>amounts to the USB equivalent of early pre-N on them... i.e. nowt worked<br>
properly with anyone else's stuff), backwards compatibility is one thing<br>but volume of data another. I'm also dubious because USB devices do<br>seem to take a hit on the CPU and well, you'll have the data stream<br>
being written to the disk; can it cope?<br><br>A good question to ask is "How much throughput does a disk need to write<br>an mpeg2/whatever it appears as stream?" and compare the average against<br>a hdparm -tT /dev/hda if the result is higher you're ok, if not, you'll<br>
possibly be dropping frames on recording.<br><br>Is this little machine going to be an "all-in-one"? If so keep in mind<br>that MySQL will be running on it and both the frontend and backend<br>programs, so you might want to max the memory on the system; which is<br>
probably PC100/133 SDRAM and thus dirt cheap. Being an older board it<br>probably won't take all that much so not an expensive proposition :)<br><br>Would it work? Probably. Would it be a good long term solution?<br>
Probably not, but handy for figuring out if MythTV is for you and then<br>throwing bigger (but not necessarily cutting edge) hardware at it, say a<br>PIII or early P4 for both recording and perfect playback :)<br><br>Sarah<br>
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<div>A 266Mhz machine could make an OK Mythbox backend with the addition of a MediaMVP to do the playback.</div>
<div>(I used to run GBPVR on an early 800mhz mini-itx which was incapable of playing mpeg2 so I used that as the recorder and MediaMVP as my playback device).</div>
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<div>Though as others have suggested I'd go for a PCI based DVB-T device as the USB solution may place too much load on the CPU (+ you'd probably need a USB2 card anyway).</div>
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<div>So nip on over to ebay and pick yourself a second hand MVP....</div>
<div>or if you want an all in one box solution, ditch the PII machine and buy a second hand P3/P4/Athlon etc</div>
<div>(P3 700mhz+ is sufficient for SD, some have used less!)</div>
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<div>Cheers</div>
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<div>Steve<br> </div>