[mythtv-users] minimum specs for PCHDTV-5500?

[Roger Heflin]

Mary Strimel wrote:
> On 3/26/08, Roger Heflin <rogerheflin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for the quick reply.  My machine has 1 GB of RAM.  Running "cat
> /proc/cpu" reports an AMD Athlon64 at 800 mhz.  A couple of follow up
> questions:
> 
> -  For recording from QAM / digital cable, can I set a lower resolution in
> the Mythtv recording profiles, and those settings will actually "take"?  I
> had no idea ... I thought I was stuck with whatever stream they were
> transmitting.

You need a lot of cpu to convert a higher bit rate/resolution to a lower bit 
rate/resolution, that is usually called transcoding and is done after the 
recording is done.  The profiles don't have any affect on the HD cards that just 
read the mpeg2 stream from the signal.   I would expect you to need about 2x 
that speed do have a chance of decoding the 1080i stuff.

> 
> - I don't know the resolution of the test file , although it was definitely
> gorgeous, much clearer than SD and played flawlessly.  Is there a tool to
> find out the resolution of that file?  Is it possible that a computer
> animated film would be easier to for my cpu to play than live action TV?
> 

I usually use mplayer and stop it and see what it said on the command line about 
the given video file.   Depending on what OS you have, will depend on if you 
have mplayer and if not how hard it is to install.

                                  Roger