[mythtv-users] How's this configuration look?

[Jeff Monks]

> >If all it's doing is MythTV, and you don't plan on transcoding the
> >recorded MPEG-2 files, then it's overkill.  The PVR-250s require very
> >little system resources for recording.  My backend is a PIII-600 with
> >384MB of RAM, and it rarely ever jumps into double digits of CPU usage.
> >Usually, recording from one PVR-250 takes about 5% of my CPU.
> 
> Really?  Cool.  If I decide to go with a less powerful CPU, is it possible 
> to tell MythTV to "renice" the transcoding jobs so they don't interfere 
> with other stuff (even if it takes six trillion years to transcode)?  

I think the transcode process automatically renices itself to lowest 
priority.  I don't use it much, so I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty 
sure it behaves nicely.  Incidentally, the few times I've transcoded on my 
backend, it ran at about 1/4 speed.  That is, an hour of TV took 
around four hours to transcode (MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, with commercial 
cutting).  Just a data point for you.

As another person pointed out, you'd be better off saving money on memory 
and CPU and buying the biggest disk you can afford.  You'll be surprised 
how quickly you'll fill your disk.

> >This should work okay.  I can't speak to the video card, but I've used
> >Celeron 566s for frontends with the MPEG-2 recordings from the PVR cards
> >and had good success.
> 
> If I wanted to also play DivX on here, would I still be ok?  Thanks.

Most likely yes.  I've transcoded some of my DVDs to DivX and XVid using 
DVD::rip and they all played back just fine on the Celeron 566 frontend 
(using roughly a 2000 kb/s or so bitrate, as I recall).