I am planning to try this on an older system with a P2 400 or 450. I will be using a Hauppage PVR card so it will have hardware encoding.

What limitations will I have with this setup? Will resolution or sound be sacrificed? I see people build similar setups but they all seem to run them at very low resolutions...however they usually are using cheaper TV tuners that do not have hardware encoders.

well actually the hardware encoder in this case hurts more than it helps. It takes almost no cpu to encode, but much more to decode since mpeg2 is more processor intensive to decode. At any rate xvmc is getting pretty usable these days, so if you make sure you have a nvidia gf4mx or newer that should help you out with the playback, and you might even be able to do full rez video.

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Xsecrets

Honestly, you won't be happy with the performance at all. Forget live TV, you may get away with mpeg playback

It would be interesting to see now that xvmc is mostly working if something like this could be pulled off though. I know in the past everytime someone wanted to do this they would enable xvmc and invariably get lockups all the time, but the lockups seem to have been ironed out of xvmc recently, if you can handle the b/w osd's (and I think the studder after osd's is still there too) you just might be able to pull it off.

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Xsecrets

Hi pugs,

Go for it! Worse thing that will happen is that you will learn something and may be able share that knowledge back.

With the hardware encoder it will record fine and you could always try a boot into a "frontend" to play it on another box. The R5A26 seems to be rather efficient code and you get more performance than expected. I always use the i686, be it a 266mhz or 1.5ghz, is it right or wrong? Who cares, it works.

Also KnoppMyth offers a lot more than just tv, it is like an iceberg.

Mike

Sorry, I forgot to mention I am mostly interested in the Capturing part for now. I really do not plan to watch Live TV on it. Playback is only a maybe. I honestly do not need any more crap hooked up to my TV

I plan to use my Xbox as a front end...or another computer for playback.

well then you should have no problem capturing with a pvr card, could probably get away with two, capture takes practically no cpu, it's the playback thats the killa

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Xsecrets

You will have NO problems watching TV or previously recorded shows at all. How do I know?

My box is a
P-II 450 MHZ (old Compaq Deskpro)
256MB RAM
160GB IDE Drive
300GB IDE Drive
PVR-350 Tuner
NO sound card

I have absolutely no problems running this Myth box (other than a tuner frequency problem I'm trying to get figured out..)

The CPU utilization is low as reported by MythWeb, even when recording or watching live TV. When watching TV or a recorded show, my cpu is under 5% usage.


Weather, Newsfeeds, photo album - everything works fine for recording cable TV, playing back Cable TV. Even recording a show and watching a different, previous recording at the same time works perfectly. Watching live-TV works perfectly. I would expect you could get at least 2 tuners, maybe more, running on that box.

BUT - What it will NOT do:
Forget about playing DVD's - too jerky as the CPU is too slow.

I don't know if it will play MP3's or CD's, as my box doesn't have a sound card.

the question rkhanso is are you using the pvr350 for your tvout? if so then it is a whole different ball game than what was asked, because the pvr350 also does hardware decoding which the pvr250's do not.

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Xsecrets

Yes, I'm using the 350's TV-Out.

I didn't see a PVR model number in pugs' original post and by reading it, guessed he'd be using a 350 by what he says in the post. It's also possible by his post that he may not even have the PVR card yet... If that's the case, he'd be wise to purchase the 350. (I know that you know all this since you're one of the gurus and I can't even figure out some of the simple things). Yes, he didn't specifically say "decoding" while he said "encoding" which may indicate a 150/250/500 card, but I thought he may just be even newer than I am and didn't know, or just didn't specify clearly. And again, I'm making another assumption (though likely more accurate than my first assumption) that pugs is a male person.

And of course, you are correct about inability of this machine to run TV-output to anything but a PVR-350 and still keep your sanity. If I was using anything else, I'd be pulling my hair out - it's even jerky video using the video card with a monitor. But, then that's the beauty of the 350 card, isn't it? The ability to make an otherwise nearly obsolete computer a PVR? Sound goes through the PVR card, no loss in video quality - a perfect solution for watching live TV or recorded shows.

I did mention the limitations as he requested - poor DVD playback...[/i]