Mailing List Archive

> I'm planning on building a MythTV box and am trying to gather
> empirical evidence to determine how fast of processor I should
> buy. I'd like to use 2 TV tuner cards so I can be recording 1
> show and watching another, or recording 2 shows at the same
> time. Ideally both would be at 640x480, or at a minimum,
> 480x480. Can someone post if they have tried doing this,
> if it worked or not, and how fast their processor is?
> Specifically I'm thinking about an Athlon XP 1800+ but it
> seems like it might be on the "bubble" of being possible at
> that speed. Thanks for any suggestions!

I have a dual 1 Ghz P3 machine and it doesn't do 576x576 live tv properly
unless I quite KDE and boot something more lightweight. From the archives it
appears that encoding is not fully SMP enabled due to a few issues in the
encoder, so in fact although I see total CPU pegged at 80%, this is probably
50% encoding on one processor and 30% decoding on the other.

With MPEG 4 I need to drop it down to 480x480 or perhaps 480x576.

I saw someone mention that 1GHZ per tuner was a good guideline for medium
quality encoding. You need extra for decoding of course.

Bottom line is I suspect that an XP 1800 is likely to be far too weak for
the quality you suggested, however, dropping it down to 240x3xx might be
just what you need.

Ed

I have a 2400 XP 2 tuner system, 512 MB PC2700. Recording at 480x400.
Works pretty well.

On Tue, 2003-04-01 at 15:26, Nick Hall wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm planning on building a MythTV box and am trying to gather
> empirical evidence to determine how fast of processor I should
> buy. I'd like to use 2 TV tuner cards so I can be recording 1
> show and watching another, or recording 2 shows at the same
> time. Ideally both would be at 640x480, or at a minimum,
> 480x480. Can someone post if they have tried doing this,
> if it worked or not, and how fast their processor is?
> Specifically I'm thinking about an Athlon XP 1800+ but it
> seems like it might be on the "bubble" of being possible at
> that speed. Thanks for any suggestions!
>
> Nick
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users@snowman.net
> http://lists.snowman.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users