[mythtv-users] Would this hardware be OK for high definition?

Allen Edwards allen.p.edwards at gmail.com
Wed Nov 26 06:53:16 UTC 2008


On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
> Robert Moss wrote:
>> I'd say mostly the Graphics card
>>
>> You really need an nvidia 6x00 or above PCI/PCIe card to do HDTV as it
>> does all the processing. Otherwise the CPU has to do all the work and
>> you'll lose frames.
> You need a video card that supports Xv.  Xv provides hardware
> accelerated scaling for video.  Intel chipsets support this just fine.
> XvMC gives hardware accelerated mpeg2 decoding, however a 3.2GHz P4 is
> plenty fast to decode any broadcast mpeg2 you may come upon.  If it is
> h.264 video that is causing you problems, XvMC will be of no benefit.
>

Avoid XvMC if you can.  It really doesn't work very well but if you
don't have the HP in the CPU, you have to use it.  I have a 2.4GHz P4
and it just barely works with HD.  An Nvidia 6200 card is all you need
for the video, btw.

As a point of reference, my AMD 5400+ doesn't work very well with XvMC
but works great without it.  I can run CPU++ without problems but
CPU-- gives me trouble.  Go figure.

If you are using existing hardware, use the 3.2 P4 as it might work
fine.  If you are buying something, get a core2duo or dual core AMD
cpu.

Allen


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