[mythtv-users] Use of Macintosh G4 as MythTV box

[Bob]

Nick Tan wrote:

8< snip Oz DVB Foxtel stuff

>> So, given the dual CPU available to me right now, should I proceed 
>> with the purchase of a capture card, or am I waving the proverbial in 
>> the wind? 

snip

> If you use hardware encoding capture cards (DVB-T does this, and 
> analogue capture cards like the PVR-250) you don't need a lot of CPU for 
> the capture of the video.

I believe the DVB cards actually don't do any encoding but neither do 
they do any decoding, they just stream the compressed video feed they 
pull of the air in whatever codec they receive it in (usually MPEG2), 
but the result is the same, both the hardware encoders (Hauppauge PVR 
cards) and the assorted digital TV cards place little demands on the 
backend CPU.

> Not sure if the CPUs will be enough for playback though.  But I've 
> played back my recordings on a P3-700 with no problems (from a remote 
> backend).

If the G4 is to be used as a frontend as well and CPU is a problem then 
you could output through a PVR 350 card (as long as your not planing to 
trascode stuff to MPEG4 for storage) or an nvidia card using XvMC 
(particularly as some of the new GPUs allegedly have MPEG4 assistance) 
as both would assist with the decoding, but, I have *no* idea if either 
would work in a PPC environment.

I wouldn't expect it to be easy though as *all* the documents are 
written from an i386 perspective

-- 
tveeprom: Hauppauge: model = 34132, rev = J158,
tveeprom: tuner = Philips FM1236 MK3 (idx = 58, type = 4)
tveeprom: audio_processor = MSP3416 (type = 14)
(new type Model 401)
model name      : mobile AMD Athlon(tm) XP Processor
cpu MHz         : 2277.214
cache size      : 512 KB
(Plenty o' grunt on an ECS k7s5a MB)
Knoppmyth R5A16 (unmodified)
http://mysettopbox.tv/CHANGELOG.txt
MythTV 0.18.1