<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Iain Buchanan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:iaindb@netspace.net.au">iaindb@netspace.net.au</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
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how about if the laptop is just the FE - good enough then? mpeg-2 only<br>
since I'm in Australia.<br></blockquote><div><br>It will probably be fine in that case. Just record something and try to play it back while the backend isn't doing any other recording. mpeg-2 isn't so hard to play back. Check the logs for the frontend and backend to see if it's getting I/O starved and "top" or similar to check the CPU use. You need to figure out what resources are being used up on this machine before you can really know what's up. It could be that the internal HDD just can't keep up when it's being asked to seek so much. <br>
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<div class="im">
</div>willing to spend a small amount of money, yes. Preferably on the<br>
desktop. I will need a video card and a hard disk. Maybe a PCI tuner<br>
if it turns out to be better on the system than my USB one.<br>
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Any comments on this alternative as a FE/BE with a dual core 3GHz?<br>
<a href="http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Twins-HDTV" target="_blank">http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Twins-HDTV</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br>The mobo looks fine. Is that for an older P4 type chip? I'm not up to date on Intel. The onboard video won't help you decode though. ATI is worthless that way in Myth, though their stuff does display things fine from what I hear. If you have the CPU and want to re-use it, that might work well for you. I do mosly NVidia/AMD stuff here, so it's more difficult for me to compare. But as a data point, I was running mpeg2 here with HD on a AMD X2-3800 using CPU decoding and it worked well. The only trouble I had was with the HDD getting too busy with the database and OS on the same disk as the recordings. I moved the OS to an old IDE drive I had sitting around and it helped a ton. When decoding a 720p broadcast with CPU I was using about 30%. 1080i with deinterlacing (bob2x) I was using about 70% CPU. I'm in the US using ATSC, so mpeg2 at a max of about 20Mbps. <br>
<br>Hopefully that helps you look in the right direction. <br>