[plug] entertainment centre

[W.Kenworthy]

Not all TV is digital so you need an analog encoder - I am using an old
V4L card (for foxtel) and all the work is done by the host. (think
foxtel, videocams as input and the like).  Paying for something like a
PVR150 when I have v4l i/p's sitting around doing nothing is a luxury.

Transcoding while running everything else.

Using one host for display and backend (serving multiple streams) can
suck the cycles.

It can be done with with less - if you dont care about the occasional
crash, or glitches in the recordings or when viewing.  Myth is not the
most stable app around, but 0.20 is not bad, except when being thrashed.

After using myth for a over a year (I think), I am getting more critical
of the quality of set top boxes (topfield and Foxtel) - they show many
of the same glitches that were present when using low end cpu's for Myth

BillK

On Thu, 2006-12-07 at 12:50 +0900, Michael Holland wrote:
> 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
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