[mythtv-users] slightly OT question about the pcHDTV card

[Erick Burtness]

At 12:17 PM 3/20/2004, you wrote:
>Hi,
>         I've got a pcHDTV card and the system requirements listed for it
>are a Pentium 1200 Mhz or higher.  I've got an 900 MHz Athlon with 512
>megs of ram.  Has anyone gotten the card to work with less CPU than is
>recommended?  For now I just want to get it working playing HD and then
>I'll make the jump to Myth.  Thanks.

I have a pcHDTV in an 800 MHz Pentium 3 machine right now, and the card 
seems to be working great. The problem is for playback, that CPU isn't 
enough to play an HD stream in real-time. I can use Myth to record HD 
shows, but when I try to watch the recordings in Myth the video and audio 
stutter badly, to the point that it's completely un-watchable.

I have had better results playing back the recorded files with other player 
software. Xine and mplayer both drop a bunch of frames to keep up, but the 
video is almost watchable, and the audio is fine. The best results I've 
found are with the videolan client. (http://www.videolan.org/) In VLC, a 
720p recording is quite watchable on my 800MHz P3. I imagine it's still 
dropping a few frames, but it looks great.

So, you probably won't be able to play HD within Myth on your Athlon 900. 
However, if you're like me and you just want to experiment before springing 
for a faster CPU, you should have no problem trying out the pcHDTV.

Erick