[mythtv] Hardware requirements confusion

Brian Cain Brian.Cain at motorola.com
Tue Feb 4 13:19:32 EST 2003


> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-dev-bounces at snowman.net
> [mailto:mythtv-dev-bounces at snowman.net]On Behalf Of Michael Stearne
>
> My thoughts exactly.  These are 800Mhz machines, I could do what is
> necessary with a 400Mhz PowerPC G3 for years, a 800Mhz x86 (even from a
> shitty maker) should be able to do this.  Have people tried this configs
> or are they just assuming based on specs?  (BTW, Thanks all who replied
> to my Walmart PC post).
...

There is no "magic number" in terms of MHz for realtime AV encoding and/or
decoding (or any other task, for that matter).  And there's no precise
multiplication factor (like your 2:1 example) for RISC/CISC comparisons,
either.

> On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 13:19, Micah Morton wrote:
> > A while back I bookmarked a site that somebody linked on here.  A site
> > with a hardware database of mythtv/freevo users. Most of the
> systems were

This may be a link to what you're talking about:
http://www.goldfish.org/~mcooper/pvrhw/
That database is probably the best answer to finding an average reliable
configuration, but you can see that they didn't limit themselves to CPU
speed (or even CPU manufacturer, or SIMD instruction set(s), or registers,
etc.) as control factors.

> > under 1ghz and a LOT of them were 450's and around there.. A while back
> > somebody said that the EPIA 933mhz M9000 motherboard would be
> > insufficient.. but how is a 450 sufficient and a 933 not?  I know the C3
> > is a lesser processor by far, but it does have kernel support
> and can't be
> > THAT much slower to where a 933 is slower than a PII 450.

It's entirely within the realm of possibility that a "933 is slower than a
PII 450".

> There are a LOT
> > of under 1ghz machines out there for cheap! (800mhz would be ideal for
> > cost) and it would be nice to be able to use a 800mhz box.
> >
> > For example. In my lab here at Intel, an engineer brought in a Compaq
> > Deskpro EN for testing. Its small, vcr-sized case would make a perfect
> > candidate for this project. This one runs around 550mhz, however some of
> > them are 800mhz (and a 1ghz model for a lot more money).. On ebay, I've
> > seen the 800mhz model as low as 120bucks with only several hours
> > remaining.  These boxes would make nice set-top boxes.. I'm
> just concerned
> > about performance.

I wish there were a simple formula for performance, but there are probably
far too many factors involved.

-Brian



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