[mythtv-users] Idiotic newby questions about Nvidia,PVR-x50's and mpegs

[J. Donavan Stanley]

michael brown wrote:

>1)  Can I get hardware decoding of mpeg by my video card to work?  
>  
>
Turn on the xvmc support in the settings.pro for MythTV.  It was once 
buggy, from what I understand, but there were some recent changes 
checked in that were supposed to make it more stable.  I've not tried it 
yet so I can't say one way or another.

>2)  I'm thinking of getting a PVR-250, would this reduce the encoding
>burden on the system enough to make it usable with the dual P-II's?
>This is $150.00.
>  
>
Check EBay you can pick up a 250 for less than $90.

>3)  The other possibility is that I shell out for a Celeron 2.4, new
>motherboard and some DDR memory and just keep my other stuff as is.
>This should only cost me about $225.00 but has the benefit of giving me
>ATA-100 support on the hard drive as well.  Would a P4 provide any
>significant benefit over the Celeron?
>  
>
You're FAR better off going with an AMD CPU over a Celeron.  Check Tom's 
Hardware they recently did a sub $100 CPU shootout.  AMD pretty much 
toasted the Celerons.

>What should I do?  Right now I'm leaning towards the motherboard/CPU
>upgrade.
>  
>
For $225 you might be able to do all of the above if you shop smart (and 
can reuse things like RAM etc).