Hi

i have ben offred this , cheep, so i was wondering if it was good enought for a front end system?

CPU: Cel 1,7Ghz

Mothter Board: Asus, something, whit onboard audio, and lan. on board vga (s3trio).

will this be usable as the front end? i recon the cpu, would be adobe to be made almost silent.

the backend, will consist of:
512mb ram, p4 cpu, at 2,6 whit HT, and 2 or 3 tv cards.

is this power full enought to handle it? I will have max 2 front ends to this backend?

what tvcards will you be using? if you will be using hardware cards like the pvrx50 then you really need to swap the front and backend machines.

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Xsecrets

isent the backend the system, where u place all the tv cards, and just stream it to the front end?

I will be useing Haupage something, probaly 150, as i cant seem to find a shop here that got 250....

unles someone got a better idea?

What Xsecrets was trying to tell you, is that contrary to most peoples intuition, with PVR cards (which have hardware encoders) the backend functions are pretty light weight. Just a matter of shuffling data from the card to the disk. I've done the bandwidth calculations here before (related to disk performance questions), and if you're interested you can search for them.

In this scenario the frontend has to work much harder to; decode the stream, apply any requested filters, do any needed scaling, ...

alright, so would the 1,7 cell be enought as a backend ?

i jsut thought the whole idea whit a front end, and backend, was u could make a small low noise comp, for frond end, and have the power horse stored somewhere else?

coma well that is what most people would like from the frontend/backend, though it generally ends up just the opposite, even worse if you are running hdtv. The 1.7 would be more than enough for a backend. For backend only with pvr hardware cards a 400 or so is enough. of course if you do any transcoding or commflagging stuff like that would take much longer.

The problem is that mpeg2 playback takes I'd say at the very least over 1G for SD hd is closer to 3G. This is of course not using xvmc, which would greatly reduce those needed specs, but is still rather buggy. I've heard good results lately, but I'm still not ready to call it good and ready for prime time.

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Xsecrets

well, the main idea was to save stuff, in xvid thats why i first thought of putting the p4 as a backend.. also will the TV cards, haupauge 150 be any good? i can see from this board, that 250 cards are realy popular, but so far i havent ben able to find any shop where i live that got em!

Also this guide is talking about sing a via cpu/board for frontend, as it is low noise and so on..

http://www.linuxis.us/linux/media/howto/linux-htpc/

well If you are using a pvr card you can't save it in mpeg4 because it is done in hardware, though you can transcode it once it's saved, in which case more cpu is certainly better as it will transcode faster. The via's are very nice, and I hear the xvmc support for them is coming along very nicely and this is definitely a product that is tested with knoppmyth now. I'm not saying every feature is going to work, but the epia boards are tested with knoppmyth each realease now, though the drivers for the pro boards(I belive it's called km400 also) are not included yet. At some point this is the way I am going to be looking once the pro drivers are in they say it can actually decode hdtv.

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Xsecrets

The first big decision you face is: Do you want high-def television or not? All other decisions flow from that one. If you want high-def playback, it will dominate your equipment choices for frontend, and to some extent the backend.

For example, if you want HD, you must have one honkin' frontend processor. Like Xsecrets says, think P4 3GHz or faster. Athlons don't do as well. (Sorry for saying this, as I'm a real Athlon fan myself, but it's just simple truth.) The backend recording process for HD isn't very stressful, but commercial flagging or transcoding ups the ante a lot.

If you consciously give up high-def, your equipment needs will scale down a bunch and all sorts of hardware becomes possible. Like Via Epia boards and such.

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What i meant was, if teh via board is powerfull enought to be front end, certenly a celeron 1,7Ghz would be so to right?

also, i wont need HD support, since it isent out yet here in Denmark, and wont be for at least 2/3 years!...

You are lucky over there (u got hdtv)

what tv cards, support saving in mpeg 4 ? and that are compitable whit Linux/MythTv ?

yes a 1.7 will work for a standard def frontend.

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Xsecrets

tnx..