[mythtv-users] Hardware: Via MII or Geforce FX5200?

[Wander Winkelhorst]

On 2/8/06, Matt Collins <matt at clues.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 10:00:48AM +0100, Wander Winkelhorst wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm just new at using MythTV and I need to buy some new hardware.
> > Because I found that a Celeron at 333Mhz and a Nvidia riva128 just
> > won't cut it.
> >
> > >From what I read, there are two options:
> >
> > 1. Buy a faster processor + motherboard + ram + PSU + Videocard +
> > everything else.
> > 2. (Possibly) Just buy a videocard that has hardware acceleration,
> > like a FX5200.
> >
> > For option 1, I found the VIA MII, which you can get up to a speed of
> > 1.2 Ghz, sounds really attractive, but I'd also need to buy RAM and
> > I'll lose some expandability (Only one PCI slot) and I'm not really
> > sure wether or not the VIA CPU's are really that fast.
>
> Via CPU's are slow. They do, however, have hardware decoding for
> the mpg stream.

Just how slow? How would you compare your 1Ghz VIA to a
PIII/PII/Celeron type CPU? I guess it would be around 500-600Mhz?

[Snip!]

> > For option 2, I found the NVidia FX5200, a real bargain at 35 euros or
> > something. But will the XvMc acceleration help my (passivly cooled!)
> > celeron 333 enough to be able to play full-PAL-sized DVD's, DivXen and
> > allso be able to do live-tv? (I allready have a PVR500, so
> > encoding/capturing takes allmost no CPU power.)
> >
> > Does anyone have experience with hardware like this? I'd like to know
> > what you learned from that.
>
> I'm not using my epia to run DVD's, but I have used it to play divx and
> mpeg streams using mplayer (rather than the pvr350 hardware), and they
> play back just fine. I'm PAL as well.

If you play the mpeg streams, how much is the CPU usage?
What kinds of mpeg streams are you using? (bitrate, resolution)

Thanks for the info sofar, it's very usefull.

Wander.