[mythtv-users] Basic requirements (hardware)

[Ray Olszewski]

At 03:34 PM 5/30/2003 -0400, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
>Hmmm... are you talking full-screen playback, or windowed?  The older,
>slower systems (~300-400 MHz) used to come with hardware MPEG decoder boards
>that the DVD drive plugged into.  Did you have one of those on your system?

No. This was a setup I put together recently, using some AGP card that 
supported xVideo (an ATI card, I think) on standard VGA output (not 
TV-out). I ran xine either fullscreen, at 100%, or at 200% of capture size, 
on an 640x480 X display. (TV caps were 320x240 DivX; DVDs varied but were a 
lot finer, usually 7??x480 DivX).

I never tried to play back a DVD itself (no DVD drive in that system), just 
the DivX re-encodings

>Also, I guess even a slower system would benefit from a modern video card
>that supports XV, so it doesn't have to to all the video & scaling in
>software.  I dunno... I'd just always heard that 450-500 MHz was kind of the
>lower limit for full-screen MPEG decoding/playback, unless you have a
>decoder board.

As I said, this appears to be true for Myth playback, which has much higher 
demands on systems than (say) xine. On my 1.7 GHz Cel, for example, Myth 
uses about 30% of CPU during playback, right in the 450-500 range. But xine 
uses <5% ... though I've only tried 320x240 TV caps, roughly 500 MB/hr, 
with xine on this system not Divx re-encodes of DVDs.