[mythtv-users] MythTV geared towards quality (DVI, SPDIF, etc)

[John Sturgeon]

Shawn,

You should get a capture card that does the encoding so that the CPU 
does not do the heavy lifting.  I'm using the HD-2000 (pcHDTV) so I 
can't speak to other capture cards, but there are plenty of cards that 
are available that do the encoding.  My CPU is an Athlon 2600+ and I am 
able to 'capture' (if you will) HDTV (1920x720p, 1920x1080i, etc...) 
with no problem at all.  In my case, the major bottlenecks would really 
be the disk drive and bus speeds.

--
John <><

Shawn wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 17:14 -0700, John Sturgeon wrote:
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>>Hey Shawn,
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>>In addition, CPU is usually not much of a consideration when it comes to 
>>*capturing*.  Most of the CPU utilization comes from decoding/viewing.  
>>That being said, unless you are decoding HDTV streams (1920x1080i for 
>>instance) an Athlon 3000+ might be considered overkill.
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>In my earlier experience, I used the cheaper cards as ivtv was (and
>sometimes still is) a little unstable. Encoding mpeg4 was a bee-ahtch
>for my little Athlon 1800+.
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>I'll have a look at the guide, but I was thinking if I up the res a
>little the CPU reqs go through the roof.
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