[mythtv-users] looking for thoughts on this hardware spec

[David jeske]

-- Burke Gillespie wrote:
> If I want to view live TV on the monitor, not a tv, do I need the
> decoding power of the PVR-350 on this low end machine? Is the
> hardware decoding only to send out to the TV and could I get away
> with a PVR-250 if I will only be using a computer monitor?

The PVR-350 decoding support is for the on-board TVout. It is not
used if you use your computer monitor.

> Is this enough machine to run both the backend and frontend on and
> watch live TV while recording in the background?

I don't have that exact setup, but I think the answer is solidly
"Yes" if your video card has XvMC support for accelerated output, and
"Probably Yes" if not.

> I may add a second card. The second card would probably be a
> hardware encoding card as well such as a pvr-x50.

These take pretty small amounts of CPU, so this is more about whether
your drives have good transfer rates.