[mythtv-users] "Good Enough" specs for HDTV?

[Richard Freeman]

Scott wrote:
> 
> Ah, that's a good point... I'm going to be using this desktop as both
> the front and backend.
>  
> 

I'm running comparable graphics hardware on a backend machine, and the
front-end can be run with live HDTV on the same machine without visual
artifacts, although it uses a fair amount of CPU.  This machine is
running 64-bit on a A64 3200+ with 2GB RAM - so I have a lot more CPU
power available.  Since I have a cheap video card I figured my config is
at least relevant.  If I try playing back files using mplayer the output
informs me that it is dropping some frames, but not enough to be visibly
noticeable.

HDTV definitely requires some horsepower.  It doesn't work at all on my
1GHz EPIA front-end (running minimyth) despite the hardware MPEG-2
decoder.  I'm not really interested in HDTV video though - once I get it
running full-steam I'll just have it immediately transcoded down to 480p
(standard-def TV).  I'm more interested in the higher input quality (vs
satellite) and the AC3 audio stream (which means I can't just use
mythtranscode to convert it since it doesn't have an option to do an
audio passthough).  I probably will need to use it sparingly since it
takes about 2 hours to transcode a 1-hour program and I can't watch the
shows on my EPIA front-end until they're transcoded.  This is a bit of a
long-term project in any case (I still don't have an antenna up for a
decent ATSC signal yet).