Hardware for pvr

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Amos H. Weatherill <right_maple_nut-/E1597aS9LT10XsdtD+oqA at public.gmane.org>

| Also, I wound recommend an AMD processor for this kind of task because
| the extremely deep pipelines on the Pentium 4 processor can impact
| the computers ability to multitask effectively in this situation.

Are you making that up, or is that based on measurement?

My intuition is that the pipeline is something like 30 cycles long.
This is 10 nanoseconds at the 3.0GHz he is contemplating.  Say there
are several instructions in flight that need to be completed, so let's
multiply by 10 -- 100ns.  The other things going on in a task switch
dwarf a 100ns penalty.

| Hyperthreading could be a booster for this, though, so you have to
| make the final decision.

FYI, some people are having problems with ivtv that look like bugs
w.r.t. SMP and preemption.  Hyperthreading appears to the system as
SMP.  So I would not count on using it.

| Obviously, you should check the MythTV hardware compatibility list before
| purchasing anything.

Yes.  And ask the Myth TV lists about questions like this.  That
audience surely has more knowledge and interest.

| For MythTV, though you can take just about any AMD Athlon XP or better
| processor
| and add supported hardware MPEG2/4 encoders on PCI cards.

ivtv seems to be the driver needed for those cards.

| From: owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org [mailto:owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org]On Behalf Of Mailing
| List

Actually, my copy said that it was
	From: Mailing List <tlug-KfBRzk3UKwol8X4E99VVQg at public.gmane.org>

| 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?

My impression is that doing the compression in the video card is much
wiser.  Hauppauge PVR 250s go for $150 on sale; sometimes even less.
Then you can use a CPU as slow as a Pentium III, I think.

There are newer models from Hauppauge.  They may be cheaper.  They may
be supported.  Other companies also produce compressing tuners.

| 1600 for a pvr / media center sounds expensive :-(

More than is needed, I think.  Depends on your goals.  Don't forget
"quiet" -- a noisy audio-video appliance is annoying.

| $324.99   Intel® Pentium® 4 -630, 3.0-GHz @ 800Mhz w/ 2Mb
|           EM64T XD (Socket 775)  w/ Heat Sink & Fan

Sounds sexy.  Not necessarily usefully so.

I am trying to bring up a PVR 250 on an x86_64 system.  Not all of the
software seem to be ready for x86_64.  Soon, I hope.

Why am I using x86_64?  Not for video reasons -- this is to be my
general purpose desktop machine.  x86_64 is a good source of low-grade
challenges.