[mythtv-users] A noob question regarding hardware req. andhardwarecodecs

Ray Olszewski ray at comarre.com
Tue Aug 5 12:01:13 EDT 2003


At 01:31 PM 8/5/2003 -0400, John Wells wrote:
[...]
>Based on your above comments, and based on what I have now, if I buy a
>Hauppauge PVR-250 or 350 and use the current ATI TV wonder as my second
>tuner, am I correct in assuming that having only one PVR-250/350 will
>force me to still have at least a 1 GHZ processor for recording and
>watching live tv at the same time?


At least 1 GHz; maybe more. As Joseph said, his rule of thmb is 1 GHz for 
encoding, 500 MHZ for decoding. (My experience is about the same as his 
here, BTW.) Since watching "live" TV with Myth involves a buffer, you are 
both encoding and decoding. So the arithmetic says you need 1.5 GHz for 
"live" TV with software encoding. Plus a bit for simultaneous operation of 
the PVR-250 ... its CPU load should be light, but that's not the same as zero.

Joseph's rule of thumb is a bit cautious; you can get by with less than it 
specifies, by making some quality tradeoffs. Reduce capture resolution to 
320x240 (for NTSC; PAL is just a tad higher) and you'll probably get by 
with 1 GHz ... though only you can decide if this quality meets your 
standards.





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