[mythtv-users] Output to h.264

[Brian Wood]

On Thursday, August 05, 2010 04:11:57 pm mike at grounded.net wrote:
> > If you're happy with the encoding in the form it arrives in, then
> > there's not much work for the backend to do and an 850MHz system with
> > 256MB of ram could do the job.  On the other hand, if you want to
> > transcode the video or do commercial flagging, you would benefit from
> > having a faster system.
> 
> Based on a plan thanks to this thread, I will have two backend servers.
> One will get it's source from a WinTV-Nova-HD-S2 Card and the second will
> be getting it from an Hauppauge HVR-1600 WinTV card. These two cards as
> input should allow me to build a mythtv setup to learn the basics. Would
> the 850Mhz/512MB servers be ok in this case?
> 
> Then I would use the 2.8Ghz/1GB workstation as a front end only, no
> additional cards in it, for now.
> 

Is that the machine with the 5200 video card?

It might be marginal for h264 HD, because that video card can't do VDPAU (it can do XvMC, which helps only with MPEG2).

So you might want to install a video card that can handle VDPAU. The problem may be that only PCIExpress and PCI (not AGP) 
versions of those cards are available, AFAIK (any information to the contrary would be very welcome).

The problem with using a straight PCI video card is that non-VDPAU-assisted stuff will be limited to the performance of the 
PCI bus and video card.

If you are playing back ATSC OTA captures in the USA, those are MPEG2, and the 5200, with XvMC, should be able to handle 
it. The only drawback might be monochrome EPG displays, I'm not sure if that was ever fixed, VDPAU came along and pretty 
much made XvMC, and work on it, obsolete.

A 2.8 Ghz. CPU is close to the edge of decoding HD, you may have to take steps to remove as much load as possible from the 
CPU, and some HD, especially high bitrate h264, might not be possible.

Your basic plan is sound, I just wanted to point out where your potential problems may lie.