[mythtv-users] Required CPU and PVR250

Michael S. Keller samsara at tulsaconnect.com
Tue Sep 7 21:07:29 EDT 2004


Travis Kelley wrote:
> Get a geforce 4 or something and you can watch a recording while your
> recording.  That system should be fine.

I started out with a PII-350 and, for everything but OSD fade-out (had 
audio stutter), it was working fine. Encoder is a PVR-250 and output 
card is an nVidia Geforce FX5200 with 128MB of memory (it's what was on 
special at CompUSA that week).

Running Linux 2.6.7 on Debian, compiled the 6111 nVidia driver for it 
and had to recompile MythTV to use XvMC. I turned on OpenGL while I was 
at it.

Then a friend donated a Tualatin 1.4 GHz Celeron to my cause and I 
switched out motherboards. Now OSD fade-out has no stutter. I haven't 
gotten wake-on-LAN to work with this board and wake-on-alarm doesn't 
always work (it's an Abit BM6), so I've given up and am leaving it on 
24x7. I'll move the functions of my file server off to other machines to 
get electricity consumption back down.

Your PIII should do fine.

The biggest frustration for me was that it wasn't obvious the drivers 
for the PVR-250 had to be loaded before the backend, so on-demand 
loading of the modules was out. I kept getting snow when I tuned. It was 
so frustrating that I installed Windoze temporarily to make sure the 
hardware was good.

Not sure if it's the firmware, but my PVR-250 seems always to deliver 
720x480 video, no matter the encoder setting. That's one I want to resolve.

-Michael


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