[mythtv-users] Specs

[Joseph A. Caputo]

Top-posting rearranged.

On Thursday 08 January 2004 12:42, Curtis Wood wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-01-08 at 22:58, Steve Bower wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "Curtis" == Curtis Wood <curtis at penguinbrat.com> writes:
> > 
> > Curtis> On the good side - I just won an xbox on ebay - aparently you
> > Curtis> can get the HDTV resoloutions from the it (1280x720;720p) - it
> > Curtis> was just released.... Now I just need the pcHDTV card, heh...
> > 
> > There has been a discussion that the xbox's CPU doesn't have the
> > horsepower to decode HDTV streams, so it's not usable for displaying
> > what you would record with the pcHDTV card.
> > 
> > My Athlon 2500+ pegs its CPU playing 1080i with Xv support, splitting
> > about 80/20 between xine and the X server; with XvMC support, it's about
> > 80% used, just by xine (20% idle).
> > 
> >   Steve.
> > 
> > 
> My plan is to try and get it to act much like dumb terminal - basically
> just a display device, X, Myth and everything else running on the
> server.
> 
> 


So, you plan to have your server/backend decode the HD stream for playback and 
pipe raw video to your X-box, which will output it to the TV?  I hope you 
have a lot of bandwidth on your LAN...

...or do you plan to run mythfrontend on your server/backend box, and export 
the X display to your X-box?  That will work for the GUI, but I don't think 
you'll be able to watch video that way.

MythTV wasn't designed to work that way.  The frontend (i.e., the box hooked 
up to your TV) has to do the decoding.  In your case, if you want an X-box 
frontend, then you're going to be trying to get an X-box to decode the HD 
stream.

Your best option here would be to have the backend auto-transcode your 
recordings down to a resoluton that can be handled by the X-box for playback.  
Of course, there are 2 drawbacks to this:  (1) you won't be able to watch 
your recordings until after they've been transcoded, and (2) it seems kind of 
pointless to record an HD stream and then transcode it down to NTSC/PAL 
resolution.

-JAC