[mythtv] Trading CPU for disk (capture using low cpu codec?)

[Henk Poley]

> Van: Isaac Richards <ijr@po.cwru.edu>
> 
>> On Thursday 12 December 2002 12:42 pm, Henk Poley wrote:
>> I guess most of you saw the yesterday article on Slashdot, about the
>> "DreamBox", http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/ .  It uses hardware
>> record and playback of MPEG2 files (AFAIK). Just the price it a bit high
>> at ~500 EUR, and it still needs a harddisk (that will make 650 EUR). 
>> And this device cannot play CDs/DVDs since it doesn't have a DVD-drive.
> 
> Nope.  It uses a dvb card to grab the satellite stream, and so is only
> useful in Europe.

I happen to live there. It can also record normal cable TV. And, "nope" to
what?

>> BTW, >=800MHz Ezra and Eden processors are also quite capable of
>> _playing_ DVDs (MPEG2) and DivX, even with their bad FPU-performance.
>> These boxes (mini-ITX and book-PCs) are around for 200-400 EUR, all-in
>> most of the time.  Misses a TV-in though, plus the harddisk that's too
>> small, 10GB :-(
> 
> From the benchmarks I've seen, those boxes, even the new 933MHz ones,
> can barely playback divx files.

Hmmm, must be the mostly-emulated FPU...

But anyways, PC Intern about the ECS i-Note IN22 (VIA C3 GigaPro):
"Trotzdem meisterte der i-Note auch Multimediaaufgaben wie das Abspielen
von Filmen oder Musik ohne problemen"

In English: "The I-Note even does multimedia-playback like video or music
quite nicely". Though that doesn't say anything about DivX in special...
They ran it on Win2k.

>> My bet is still that MythTV costs more, as long as you don't want
>> everything. A nice looking silent MythTV-PC in the order of magnitude
>> what Isaac uses cost 890-1020 EUR, AFAIK. Unless you go bargainshopping
>> all around the internet, but that might show up not to save you that
>> much.
> 
> About US$200 for the CPU, motherboard, and RAM to get something faster
> than what I have.  Figure $50 for a decent tuner card, another $50 for an
> older gf2 with a tv out, $50 for a cheap desktop case, and $100 for 80GB
> of harddrive space.  Not terribly expensive.
>
> I think I spent about $80 getting the fan noise down to acceptable levels
> -- quieter than my ps2 and gamecube, at least.

Athlon XP 1800+   :  89.00
256MB DDR333-CL3  :  85.00
(..alternate..)

Adds to 174 EUR, pretty sloppy motherboard for ~40 euros. Cheapest ('good'
one) I see are ~85 EUR. btw, 10 EUR more and you have faster DDR266-CL2.
And off coarse SDRAM is about half the price per MB.

No offence meant, but $50 for a case would probably buy you one you _need_
to put in a closet, I guess. In my case ;) a desktop model won't fit (not
enough space near TV).

>> Wouldn't it be handy to make a general resize prog that can be piped to
>> the actual encoder (you know, capture at 2x the resolution you record
>> at). mjpeg has it built in, isn't? It might as well improve DivX
>> compression since the uncompressed picture would be cleaner (less
>> 'snow'). And future codecs will like it too.
> 
> I dunno, I'd think that resizing in software when you can just ask the
> capture card for the lower resolution would be fairly silly.  I doubt
> you'd get any better picture quality out of doing that.

Someone told quite recently on the list that he experienced this.

	Henk Poley <><