[mythtv-users] Replacing my VCR with MythTV and a Celeron 550

[Thatcher Ulrich]

On Oct 22, 2004 at 11:57 -0400, Eric Medlin wrote:
> 
> I have a Celeron 366 overclocked to 550 on an old Abit BM6
> motherboard with 196megs of ram.  I also have an ATI 8500 for TV
> out, Diamond mx300(aureal 2) sound card, and two 40gig harddrives
> for storage.  I plan to compile gentoo from scratch to get all the
> speed I can.  My main rig a P4 2.4 will help in compiling so I can
> finish before next year.  My main question is can I use a bttv card
> to record video at or higher than VHS quality with this computer.  I
> don't need live TV.  I just want to record something and then later
> play it back.  I know a PVR-250 or something would be better, but I
> am trying to save money.  If it workes and I really like it I may
> get a PVR-150 later when it works with linux and mythtv.

I have a P3-650 system w/ 384MB of RAM and a bttv card, NVIDIA GFMX440
for TV out.  I'm running a stock Debian 2.6.8 kernel & mostly stock
packages.  In Live TV, I have to run 320x240, using RTJPEG, to avoid
bogging down.  CPU usage is about 60-65%.  The visual quality is
pretty crappy at that resolution.  Record-only is much better; I think
I'm currently recording at 480x480.  The quality is decent.  No
problems with playback.  I haven't gotten around to fiddling with the
settings yet, to try to get optimal quality.

At some point I'm probably going to upgrade my CPU for the sake of
Live TV.  If you don't care about Live TV, then perhaps you'll be OK
with what you have, based on my experience.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com