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

[Chris Pinkham]

> Just another experience here:
> 
> 512x480, 3200kbps mpg4 watching live tv lets my 1600xp run with 35-40% 
> idle. I can't believe the poor performance you are getting out of your 
> systems. Maybe it's the vidcard XV support that's partially done in 
> software ?

I second that.  I was able to run 352x480 LiveTV on my Athlon 700 using
mpeg4 compression with 3300Kbit/sec scaled (which comes to around
1800-2000Kbit/sec when myth scales the bitrate down since I was running
at 352x480 instead of 640x480).  Trying to go up to 384x480 would cause
skips occasionally, but 352x480 worked ok for either LiveTV or for
watching a prerecorded show while another was recording.

Lots of things come into play as to why some people can't get good
performance, mainly video and sound related issues I think (ie, how
much cpu is being used just to capture and display the raw data not counting
encoding/decoding).

-- 

Chris