[mythtv-users] Testing the HDTV Waters

[Justin The Cynical]

Calvin Harrigan wrote:
> I've been using Mythtv with SD for years now.  I've decided to try HD, 
> there are quite a few OTA HD channels available in the area.  I browsed 
> through the list looking for minimum configurations needed to play back 
> HD.  The specs seemed a bit high.  My current setup is an Athlon XP 1800 
> with a FX5200 video card, 512 Megs ram. 360 gigs storage.  According to 

*snip*

> dvi->hdmi.  So the 1080i was scaled.  Does anyone else have a similar 
> low end setup that is using hd successfully?  Is an 1800 just too slow?  
> Any comments appreciated.

The specs listed are for software decoding.  If you have a video 
subsystem that supports MPEG2 decoding/acceleration, you can get away 
with a lot less.

My current machines are a socket 478 Celeron 2.0 (production) and a 
socket A AMD TBird 1 gig (development), both boxes with NVidia cards. 
The celery has a 6200, the bird a MX440, both 4x AGP.  Both of them can 
play HD fine using XvMC with peak CPU around 70 to 80%.