[mythtv-users] Re: New Mac Mini

[Scott Alfter]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 12:16:34AM -0600, Loren H. Burlingame wrote:
> I always thought the backend was supposed to be the one with the
> horsepower.....I mean, I run a P2 500Mhz machine as a frontend right
> now with no problem....and you can pick those up for maybe $30.

It's the other way around, at least if you're doing HDTV capture or hardware
MPEG-2 compression of non-HD video.  Capture imposes a minimal load on the
processor when the encoding is done by the broadcaster or the capture card,
but playback (unless you're using the decoder on a PVR-350) requires
considerably more power.  This is especially true of HD video...some sample
clips I downloaded play OK on my Athlon XP 2400 frontend/backend if XvMC is
enabled (other than the usual gotchas pertaining to XvMC), but 1080i skips
and jumps if XvMC is disabled.

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/            Top-posting!
 \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden            >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 185 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20050123/155ec4fb/attachment.pgp