[plug] entertainment centre

[Michael Holland]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, Shannon Carver wrote:

> Yea, a friend originally had Celeron 2.6, then Pentium4 2.8C doing the
> processing.  Still wasn't happy with it.  Athlon64 3200+ worked sweet though

I understand that in the US you want a powerful CPU for real-time
encoding. But what is the problem here, where TV is digital?
I was using a pIII-600 for recording, and its massive overkill :-)

For the HTPC, I picked up a used Dell Optiplex SFF off ebay, and it works
well. Very quiet, small, and black to match the hifi gear.
Then added an nVidia AGP card for HD playback and TV-out under Linux.

1.8GHz P4 does HD with hardware mpeg2, or software mpeg4.  Its a bit slow
at transcoding a HD movie, but it doesn't matter if its an overnight job.


Mike