[mythtv-users] Digital TV question

[Ivan Kowalenko]

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On Jun 28, 2006, at 12.22, Mark J. Small wrote:

> On Wednesday 28 June 2006 13:53, Timothy Waters wrote:
>> No, just regular old analog. So would it work for that? I've got one
>> PVR-250MCE.

Please don't top-post.

>>>>
>>>> Oh, I've got a 1.67Ghz AMD Athlon 2000+ chip in my desktop. If I
>>>> upgrade
>>> my
>>>> RAM to say 1GB and put at least a 128MB video card in there,  
>>>> would that
>>>> make it a sufficient dedicated MythTV box?
>
> I don't see any need to do upgrades.

Future-proofing. In the future, he MAY want to do HD. It'll help to  
have that already in there, especially if he can get the card for a  
steal. 128 MB of VRAM seems a little overkill, though. Also, the  
video card could be useful if he ever wants to use those OpenGL- 
animated menus they're cookin' up in 0.20.

Besides, if the front end and back end are the same machine, a good  
amount of RAM is erring on the side of caution.

> The backend part takes nothing since you have a PVR 250.  A beefy  
> video card is only useful for XVMC, and that still causes some  
> folks problems.  Extra RAM may help if you are using a Gnome or  
> KDE, but when you are watching TV, you don't tend to be also doing  
> resource intensive activities.

We're forgetting about MySQL and background tasks. If we're talking  
about the back-end, MySQL eats up a fair amount of RAM. And if the  
system is doing other jobs in the background (front end or back end),  
like Commercial Flagging or transcoding, that extra RAM is going to  
be useful. Between 128 and 256 is MINIMAL for a front-end. No lower  
that 256 for a back-end. The XBox has a mere 64 MB, and menus are  
noticeably slower than on systems with more RAM.

> With your system specs, you don't need xvmc for SD anyway.  If you  
> really want to throw money at your mythbox, get a huge hard drive...

Or additional capture cards. Once you have WickedHuge™ storage,  
you're going to want to use it. ;)
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