Hello, I'm fairly new to the MythTV world, but I have done a sh*tload of reading lately and I feel like I'm reading to get my CCard out and get my hands dirty.

I made the subject line so hopefully if anyone else has questions this thread will point to them. Nothings worse then poorly titled subject lines for a search. You guys might think I'm full of sh*t but when this takes off (widespread) and it is slowly those one-thousand asked questions get old. It surely does on the my Subaru Car forums.


Now that i got that out of the way, the real things need to be answered. here it goes....

With Dualcores rolling out and the age of single processing is certainly coming to an end, Multiple cores/processors are becoming a certain reality.

1. Obviously Linux supports dual processing, as does MythTV, but 64-bit support seems to be non-existent from what I can tell how important is dual-processing? How much more of a performance Increase can someone expect. I saw on the MythTV documentation that dual 450 celerons can do XXX amount of encoding/viewing, but nothing documenting the newer chips. My main question is how much will this benefit encoding?

2. I plan on doing full-blown HDTV support (1080p if possible with dual-processing for future support) via Comcast firewire 6200 HD box and also bittorrent HD downloads. I know for a fact that many things put out via bittorrent are not full-res HD, but I also know for a fact that 1080p movies are available if one looks hard enough. I guess the main goal is not do some fancy picture-in-picture HD junk, but more of re-encoding HDTV mpeg2 firewire streams in a more space saving codec, whether that be H.264, WMA9/10, etc. All while watching tv over the same box. ~Thats alot, and now that I actually typed it out, maybe a frontend and backend would be required.

3. Would I benefit from any extra card, excluding some multi-thousand dollar professional card? (After looking more, the new Nvidia 7800GTX chip new "Pure Video" has onboard support for the h.264 decoding. http://www.htpcnews.com/main.php?id=nvidia_editors_day_3/ Obviously this looks like a great solution, although $600 for a single card is ridiculous even to someone like myself.

4. Terrestrial HDTV isn't really in my plans, and if I can cut this card out then I will. Do the PCHDTV cards add anymore benefit to a system such as mine that will use a Firewire input until something in the pipeline replaces this?

5. If this all turns out to be the *solution* to HTPC's (Dualcore chips) is it worth waiting because this could be a huge boost in performance for little extra $$ come few months to a year.

6. Then my more personal question, would my OCed to 2.4ghz Northwood with 512mb ram and Asus p4b266 mobo with an Nvidia 256mb geforceFX 5600xt vid card w/ 200-250gb HD get the job done for HDTV recording (Firewire stream) and HDTV 1080i playback?

I think I got really technical here, but these are a lot of unanswered question. Hopefully I my unanswered questions will answer more for others. And I think it is important with singles cell CPU’s being replaced. If you can only answer 1 of my questions I’d like to hear about it because I know I wrote a book, and I’m sure the answers will comeback 5-fold

Thanks,

Jason

I'd suggest taking a gander at the MythTC archives. There was a thread on dual-core CPUs.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I have done many searches, unless I'm looiking in the wrong section or website still very little is said about dualcore/processor chips under a HDTV environment.

Its easy to gather from the one thread that YES! Dual proccessing is benficial, but my question is how much? And is it worth waiting for? And how well with HDTV?

mythtv-users mailing list digest is probably what cesman was referring to:

http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/mytht ... re;#129553

http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/mytht ... re;#137242

I imagine the dual-core processors will be most important for things like transcoding and commercial search.

there was a post about dual processors on the forum recently. The basic overview is that encoding/decoding is not really threaded at this point and does not benifit from dual cores/processors. However any transcoding commercial cut webmin mythweb etc that is running in the background at the same time can use the second proccessor.

As for the p4 2.4 it will deffinately do 720p 1080i will be pushing it to the very limits if it works, but it's deffinately worth a try. Once xvmc gets fixed, and I've heard some success stories with it recently, so looks like they are making good progress, that box should be plenty for 1080i.

As for the $600 vid card don't waste your money on it, as it won't work for hardware decode of anything till the drivers support it, and xvmc does not at the moment, and by the time it does that card will no doubt be MUCH cheaper, and some new card with new features will be around if you want to pay a premium.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Thanks for clarifying the links. What a bummer on the whole dualcocre issue. My main goal was to do transcoding and watch HDTV at the same time, but that doesn't look too promising. So I'm assuming I would see some benefit it transcoding and decoding at the same time? But no benefits during strick transcoding? I'm thinking since MythTV already has to rone in the background and other processes that the transcoding would use on core and the rest another core, because MythTV is multi-threaded. And then nothing close to the 80% increase in speed that I've read in some places?

I'm really tossed up on this issue now. I've heard it WILL benefit and that it wont benefit. Oviously I'm trying to get the most out of my dollar. Linux does support hypertreading correct, because I assume its a hardware/chipset design over software/drivers.

On that note if I had to get a new system what looks more appealing assuming prices dont deviate more than 100$ of each other and that the use will most likely be HDTV content w/ some SD content?
1. P4 3.0ghz Pentium-D with 1gb DDR No PVR card (All firewire/bittorrent RSS, I hope )
2. AMD 3200+ OCed to whatever I can 3700+ W/ new DFI nf3 ultra board and 1gb DDR (All firewire/bittorrent RSS, I hope )
3. P4 3.0ghz w/ HT 1gb DDR Asus board I guess (All firewire/bittorrent RSS, I hope )

* All with 250-300gb drive, Nvidia 5600xt 256mb, or 5200 if the 256mb ram doesn't benefit, with firewire input, and hopefully no PVR card, either onboard sound for SP/DIF dolby pass-thru or a simple Creative labs Audigy chip.

4. If someone has a better solution I want to hear it. AMD Dual cores would be an option, but at the moment I havent seen any plans to release a lower-price chip that isnt 4200+ or higher. The base price on that chip is around $500 which is too much for a part. I hope to get Mobo, processor, and 512/1gb ram for 500-600$

Jason