Re: [mythtv-users] Host requirements

2005-02-17 Thread raray 
On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:

 On Thursday 17 February 2005 6:39, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  I've about decided to purchase an Air2PC receiver but I'd like an
 opinion
  about host requirements. The machine I'm using is several years old, a
 dual
  1GHz PIII with 1.5Gb of ram and 1.25Tb magnetic storage. I have a
 LML33
  and the machine is barely fast enough to support capture at full
  resolution. In your opinion would it support the Air2PC?

 The LML33 is a hardware MJPEG capture card, right?  Depsite doing some

Yes


 encoding in hardware, they take a surprising amount of processing from
 the host computer, especially if your capture parameters are not

The LML33 uses almost no cpu time. The bottleneck is disk access.


 optimal.  The CPU requirements for capturing with an Air2PC card, OTOH,
 are practically zero, since the stream is already encoded as MPEG2.
 However, if you receive any HD channels you will not be able to play
 them back on that machine without hardware assistance (like an MPEG2
 decoder, or at least a video card that does XvMC).

What would you recomend?


Richard Ray


 -JAC
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Re: [mythtv-users] Host requirements

2005-02-17 Thread Joseph A. Caputo 
On Thursday 17 February 2005 13:57, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
  The LML33 is a hardware MJPEG capture card, right?  Depsite doing 
some
 
 Yes
 
 
  encoding in hardware, they take a surprising amount of processing 
  from 
  the host computer, especially if your capture parameters are not
 
 The LML33 uses almost no cpu time. The bottleneck is disk access.

Ah.  Well, if I/O is your bottleneck, then an Air2PC might not be any 
better; I don't know what the throughput reqs are for HDTV.  Sure you 
don't need a faster disk/controller?  Are you using DMA?

  The CPU requirements for capturing with an Air2PC card, OTOH,
  are practically zero, since the stream is already encoded as MPEG2.
  However, if you receive any HD channels you will not be able to play
  them back on that machine without hardware assistance (like an MPEG2
  decoder, or at least a video card that does XvMC).
 
 What would you recomend?

For decoding HDTV?  Either a fast (~3 GHz) processor, or 
hardware-assisted decoding.  Right now, the best option for that would 
be (I think) a new-ish Nvidia card that does XvMC, like the GeForce4 MX 
or GeForce FX5200.  Or you could transcode it down to a lower 
resolution, but that would mean you couldn't watch anything until hours 
later when the transcoding was done.

-JAC
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