<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 9:12 AM, MH Acct <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mh_acct2@yahoo.co.uk">mh_acct2@yahoo.co.uk</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;">
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td style="font: inherit;" valign="top">This should be a quick yes or no answer (hopefully). I am setting up a server which will purely be a backend machine and will not have a monitor or TV hooked up to it - it will be used to stream content over the network to my laptops. It's got a basic on-board graphics card, but would it benefit from having an additional graphics card in it? I thought I had read somewhere that more powerful graphics cards can be used with MythTV to help take some strain off the main processor, but is that only in the case where the unit is being used as a client, too, or can extra graphics cards help with either processing the input streams from a tuner card, or with processing streams being fired across the network to clients?<br>
Thanks<br>MH<br><br></td></tr></tbody></table><br></blockquote><div><br>You will gain no advantage by putting a more powerful graphics card in your mythbox that is acting as solely as a backend. I suppose it is possible that in the future, tasks such as commercial flagging and transcoding could be offloaded to a powerful GPU, but that is not a feature now. If that ever happens, you could always upgrade then.<br>
<br>If you are setting up any frontends though, you should strongly consider using a nvidia card capable of VDPAU, which will offload playback/decoding for many CPU-intensive codecs and provides better deinterlacing than otherwise available.<br>
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