[mythtv-users] Just built MythTV, beginner questions

[maarten van den Berg]

On Tuesday 16 March 2004 16:36, Patrick Reynolds wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Maarten van den Berg wrote:
> > On Sunday 14 March 2004 08:49, Dirk Aust wrote:
> > > Your CPU will hardly manage ONE capture but never 2, I would guess
> > > buying a PVR-250, it works well for me, but should try if you can
> > > playback at least MPEG1 on your machine.
> >
> > ??  I believe you're talking about my current celeron ?  But I referred
> > to an "AMD Athlon 2600+" which is what I have planned for this mythtv
> > box.
>
> An Athlon 2600+ should do a fine job of capturing one signal at full
> resolution.  It probably won't be enough for two.  (My 2400+ is about 80%
> doing 640x480 Live TV.)  Even if the CPU has enough power to encode two
> MPEG4 streams, you might get bus conflicts or missed interrupts trying to
> move that much data around from two sources at once.

?? Wow, so basically you're saying "NO current CPU will do two streams at once 
when using software encoding" (at high quality, that is). I didn't know that.   
I reckoned that since watching Live TV is one encoding + one decoding going 
on at the same time, that doing two simulaneous encodings might not be that 
far-fetched after all.   But I have no facts to back that up. ;-)

> If you're definitely planning to upgrade to the 2600+, I guess you may as
> well try the dual-PCTV approach, but don't be surprised if you end up
> buying at least one PVR-250.  :)

I'm not planning on, I already bought and built my athlon box yesterday. :-)
However, as I might have mentioned in other posts, I'm really struggling 
getting the stations right, and I've had SO much trouble getting the system 
as a whole to work at all with two cards that I took one out for now.

It was never my specific goal to build a two-card system, but as I already 
owned two cards I thought, 'might as well...'  But I own two old VCRs so even 
if the occasion arises I can use that. The only real danger I'm aware of is 
that one chooses "record this show on any channel whenever it's on" often; 
then collisions are bound to happen and you just might miss an important 
show.  But for now, I'm happy with a single card. :-)

Maarten


-- 
Yes of course I'm sure it's the red cable. I guarante[^%!/+)F#0c|'NO CARRIER