On 11/4/2005 5:18 PM Michael Tiller wrote:
Here are a few questions:
[snip]
5) I'd like this to be as cheap as possible (WAF). If I'm just using the frontend to playback DVDs and programs recorded on a backend, I assume I can get by with some pretty low end specs. Since I only need to do playback, I suppose a PIII could probably fit the bill although I suspect that might actually be hard to find. I have this thought in my head that someday I'll have HD quality recordings on my backend. What does it take to get HDTV playback (only) for a frontend. The MythTV site mentions some kind of NVIDIA acceleration? I probably can't afford to protect for this capability but it doesn' t hurt to at least understand the tradeoff.
From what I've gathered reading this list for the past 9 months, it's the frontend that needs the horsepower unless the backend is encoding real time. Then they both need horsepower. However with the PVR-x50 cards and their built-in hardware encoders, very few boxes are encoding real-time using their CPU. And then with ATSC signal, it is already digital and is just streamed to disk. The only time a backend uses much horse power is during commercial flagging or transcoding. But since neither is real time, it just becomes a matter of how long you want to wait. :)
On the other hand, the frontend needs to be fairly powerful to decode ATSC signals and display them real time. It seems the estimates I've seen are for a minimum of 2ghz with 2.5 being more acceptable.
Cheers, Drew -- Visit The Alchemist's Warehouse Magic Tricks, DVDs, Videos, Books, & More! http://www.alchemistswarehouse.com _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
