Is it possible to run MythTV (not just a frontend or backend) on a
PIII 733 Mhz
128 MB RAM
system?

Hi,
Yes if the hard drive is big enough, at least 20gig or > , you will be needing swap ~512meg I typically run 256 ram. You will want a pvr-x50 for recording, Tv play might be marginally smooth without a pvr-350 however everything else should be fine. I am assuming ntsc as I don't know about pal limits.

I have a Dell 400mhz, 256meg,13gig pvr350 and the only thing it won't do is the eye candy during music play, candy makes the music do pauses.

Mike

Whilst on the subject of minimum specs - does a software-encoding DVB-T card take off some of the overhead from recording TV? I've read in a few places that because it's broadcast in mpeg-2, the system doesn't have to do as much as with an analogue card with no hardware encoding.

Yes, that is true. I have had success with a PIII 500 and a DVB-T card. Any card that recieves a similar signal (like ATSC in the United States), or which has hardware MPEG encoding (like a PVR 150/250/350) is in the same boat.

Not that more horsepower isn't handy, though. Like when preparing DVDs to burn, or the MythMusic visualisations, or PiP with two cards, or if you want de-interlacing in MythTV or mplayer/Xine.

_________________
| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

Excellent! I knew that the technology would catch up with my stinginess if I waited long enough I've been prototyping a 1GHz AMD system with a TV-Go I had lying around, but my local place has the Twinhan 3020C for £25 at the moment so that should give me a much more usable system.

The problem come with the playback. It takes no cpu to save the mpeg2 stream to disk, but quite a bit to decode it for playback. If you use a nvidia gf4mx or better you can use xvmc to hardware accelerate than and help you out, but 1g is about bare minimum for software decode of sd mpeg2. Now if you start talking atsc hd then triple that figure.

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

Xsecrets

I'll see how I go. I've got a gf2mx in at the moment, but I think watching should be ok...I'm more likely to be wanting to do something else at the same time as recording (watchig a DVD/video etc) than at the same time as watching a show. If it comes to it I can pick up a gf4mx for a tenner on Ebay though.

I hope to be trying out the complete system soon (when I can get the TV for a couple of hours now that Mrs Goujons has got hooked on this Big Brother nonsense), so I'll post my results. I've got it mostly going fine so far, just need to sort out a few niggles (blue lines at the side of the picture, XMLTV not behaving etc). It's a:
1Ghz Athlon
512mb SDRAM
80GB hdd
Twinhan 3020C (going in tonight)
Geforce 2 MX400
E1371 sound
28" widescreen telly
A load of Xvid and mp3 on a network share

And all built from bits and bobs lying around or being thrown out by friends (except the Twinhan).

Just realised I've hijacked someone else's thread here - sorry, vhab123

1GHz is comfortable, but like I said, it can be done with a PIII 500. This was a Compaq DeskPro EN (which had ATI Rage 128 inbuilt graphics), playing back pre-recorded MPEG2 @ 720x576x25i without de-interlacing. I think the data rate was 7.8Mb/sec.

It was MythTV 0.17 though (later versions skipped a frame every few seconds), LiveTV wasn't such a success, and I think I had a hard time getting an Xv-compatible driver loaded.

As another data point, a 1GHz VIA C3 can just keep up with LiveTV, where an 800MHz PIII has no trouble.

_________________
| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club