[mythtv-users] Idiotic newby questions about Nvidia, PVR-x50's and mpegs

[michael brown]

Hello all

New to MythTV and the list here, but I've already accomplished getting
it to work (sorta)  I've been using Linux as a home media system for a
few years now, but my stuff is a far cry from MythTV and needs to be
made usable buy the wife.  Congratulations to the developers for doing
such an incredible job, very professional.  This is very nice stuff and,
having used Linux since 1995, was surprised by how easy it was to get
working.

Now for some background.  This weekend I spent some time installing
MythTV and getting it working, but alas my PC is too slow.  Right now I
have a Hauppauge WinTV card, 8X Nvidia MX-440 and dual P-II 450's on a
BX chipset motherboard w/512 MB ECC SDRAM.  All this junk hosts a Gentoo
installation built from scratch with a Gentoo patched 2.4.20 kernel.
I'm using the nvidia-4496 drivers currently.  I'm thinking that I should
revert to the older 4363 drivers so that the overscan will work.  The
motherboard only does AGP 2X.

I can basically watch live TV at 480*480 capture as long as nothing else
is running on the machine.  Both CPU's are pretty well maxed out at this
point.  As soon as any other load is placed on the machine (like running
the filldatabase thingy for example).  It starts pausing every few
seconds for a fraction of a second.  Plus, it eventually leads to
overheating of the CPU's (by my standards).  Actually I kinda expected
it to be worse after reading the documentation and given my hardware.

Now for some dumb questions:
1)  Can I get hardware decoding of mpeg by my video card to work?  What
option would I use for the X configuration file and/or how would I be
able to check and see that it was working?  I'd really like to use this
feature of the card if it's at all possible.

2)  I'm thinking of getting a PVR-250, would this reduce the encoding
burden on the system enough to make it usable with the dual P-II's?
This is $150.00.

3)  The other possibility is that I shell out for a Celeron 2.4, new
motherboard and some DDR memory and just keep my other stuff as is.
This should only cost me about $225.00 but has the benefit of giving me
ATA-100 support on the hard drive as well.  Would a P4 provide any
significant benefit over the Celeron?

What should I do?  Right now I'm leaning towards the motherboard/CPU
upgrade.

michael brown

Sorry to be so long winded, but it's hard to be brief AND thorough.  ;-)