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

[Mark Greenwood]

On Sunday 08 Nov 2009 04:26:22 Johnny wrote:
> > 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.

I concur with the VDPAU recommendation, I've been using it for a week or two connected via HDMI to a 37" TV. I can watch OTA terrestrial digital broadcasts using either the integrated tuner in the TV or via reocrdings from Myth as my antenna feeds both. Playback from myth has noticeably better picture quality. How this is possible I don't know...

Using VDPAU will also take a whole load of work off the main CPU so playing 1080p video won't be a problem.

Mark

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