[mythtv-users] Low end experiment with latest Knoppmyth

[Kim Wall]

ffrr wrote:
> I wanted to see whether a very low end machine I had kicking around, 
> would work with a DVB card and using knoppmyth.

Another datapoint (setup I used to test new capture cards a few weeks 
back before adding them to an existing backend):

Dell Optiplex GX1 (PII 450MHz, 256meg RAM, some sort of onboard intel 
graphics chipset using VGA output)
No audio (some Intel chipset that Knoppmyth didn't configure 
automatically - I didn't bother worrying about this, as I was more 
interested in verifying the capture cards worked than building a 
functional myth box)
Ancient Maxtor 8gig hard drive
Hauppauge PVR250 / Avermedia DVB-T771 (didn't try them both at once)
Knoppmyth R5A16 (running the i686 mythtv binaries)

With screen res at 1024x768, and deinterlace disabled, live TV was 
occasionally stuttering with the PVR250, and perfect with DVB on most 
channels (in the UK the majority broadcast at lower bitrates than the 
250's default 2.2G/hour).  Watching an in-progress recording was 
slightly better than live TV.  Watching previous recordings (with no 
recording in progress) was perfect.  Mythfilldatabase (or anything 
disk-intensive, really) made the whole thing crawl to a stuttery halt.

So yeah.  With hardware capture, you can get away with quite a low spec. 
    Given a decent disk, this could have made a perfectly functional 
backend-only box (if you didn't want to do too much transcoding).  I'd 
probably want another 100MHz or so if I was going to use it as a 
frontend, as a random cron job would be enough to induce stuttering.

FWIW I have a dedicated frontend 'in production' based on a 700MHz 
Duron, with an MX4000 outputting via s-video, which does the job perfectly.

Kim.