Hardware for pvr

[John Macdonald]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 05:39:43PM -0500, Mailing List wrote:
> I know, it.s been beaten to death.  I was wondering if the 
> bellow system is powerful enough to handle myth TV encoding 
> and streaming video for MPEG-4.  The TV card I might
> use will not have hardware encoding on it.  Is mythTV the
> most widely used pvr software?
> 
> 1600 for a pvr / media center sounds expensive :-(
> 
> 
> The system will likely be something like the bellow 
> system.  Is this overkill?
> $389.99   Shuttle® SB77G5 Pentium® 4 Socket 775 
> $324.99   Intel® Pentium® 4 -630, 3.0-GHz @ 800Mhz w/ 2Mb
>           EM64T XD (Socket 775)  w/ Heat Sink & Fan
> $199.99   1Gb DDR SDRAM Ram Module, PC3200
> $199.99   (2) 250GB Maxtor SATA-150 7200RPM 16Mb 9ms OEM
>  $79.99   Leadtek® WinFast® TV2000 XP Expert (PCI) 
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> $1394.94  
>   $97.65  
>  $111.60  
> =========================================================
> $1604.19  Total
> http://sys.us.shuttle.com/BarebonePromos/index.htm

Speaking with no direct experience whatsoever (so check it out
before you take any action on this suggestion :-) I'd guess
that you would be able get more than enough horsepower out of
a much slower CPU, using a more powerful TV card if necessary
would likely let you get away with a discarded old system.

I'd also only get one disk at first - by the time you fill up
the first disk, the same money will buy a bigger second disk.

You should check:
1) How much CPU horsepower is really needed
2) what disk throughput is needed.  (That might make the
    different between being able to use the IDE interface
    already on an old system and buying an SATA interface.
    But, since DVD drives can be read at multiples of the
    display rate, I don't think disk throughput is really a
    problem that forces you to get high speed disks.)
3) I also really doubt that memory is an issue - you read
    a bunch of bits in, massage them somewhat, then write
    the bits out, the number of bits you work on at a time
    is not ging to be very onerous

An old system will probably not look nice sitting in your
living room, so that might force getting a pretty box - but
that is separate from filling it with all new components.

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