[mythtv-users] What's the best way to get started?

[Johnny]

> I (currently) only receive and watch OTA ATSC video.  So I don't need
> a whole lot of horsepower to encode the video, but I do need to
> playback 720p and/or 1080i video.  I'm not sure how to interpret the
> "HD_Playback_Reports" page on the wiki, but if I buy a retail CPU
> (that fits in the retail uATX motherboard I stick in the case), is it
> likely that I'll get something that can't handle that?  How much
> memory is "enough" for MythTV?

I would highly recommend going with Nvidia and taking advantage of
VDPAU for hardware accelerated playback and deinterlacing
(http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU). Pretty much any modern dual-core
CPU will be sufficient for mythtv especially with VDPAU. I would focus
on low power (ie low wattage). The most computationally intense things
will be commercial skipping, transcoding, and database. You would
probably be hard pressed to buy a memory kit small enough to be a
problem for myth. Just get the standard 2 GB kit and that will be
fine, even 1 GB would work.