[mythtv-users] mythtv box not powerful enough?

Nick Rout nick.rout at gmail.com
Mon Jan 18 02:37:54 UTC 2010


On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Travis Tabbal <travis at tabbal.net> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Nick Rout <nick.rout at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Its a laptop!
>>
>> I often see this, people set up an old machine as a trial, and are
>> disappointed, putting them off for life.
>>
>> Not that this is an old machine I guess.
>
>
> I didn't catch that bit. :)
>
> How about the Broadcom Crystal HD? I don't know if there is a Myth patch
> yet, but if there is, there's a mini-PCIe card you could put into a laptop.
> I know XBMC supports it, and the drivers are open source, so I expect Myth
> will support it soon if it doesn't already. Even with offloading the
> playback, I expect a combined FE/BE on a laptop is going to have trouble
> with disk I/O with HD video.
>
> If the OP is willing to spend some money, the Aspire Revo or similar would
> be a way to get a nice FE box. Still about $200US though.
>
> h264 is tough to decode without help from dedicated hardware at HD
> resolutions. IIRC the recommendation for CPU only decoding was around 3Ghz
> Core2Duo.

Actually the OP is from Australia (well his email address is), so I
would assume its mpeg2, not h264.

I think this crystal HD card is going to turn a lot of older laptops
into frontends, provided they have minipci-e (note the 'e'). They'll
have to be wired, or find a usb/pccard wireless option, as most only
have one minipci-e slot.


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