MythTV and capture drivers for FC/RHL, rpms, HOWTOs and lists

[Matt Morgan]

On 04/09/2004 08:26 AM, Axel Thimm wrote:

>On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 03:45:48PM +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
>  
>
>>> Quoting from the VDR project, a PVR project similar to MythTV/freevo
>>>
>>>centered around DVB capture cards, a 200MHz PC is enough! For
>>>MythTV/freevo which are a bit more feature rich I would estimate a
>>>higher lower bound. I also depends on whether you want to have
>>>(optional) near to real time MPEG4 transcoding and so on.
>>>      
>>>
>>Huh? IIRC the guide I read that uses the ATrpms packages
>>did use a haugepage capture card and it was a new high-end machine
>>like an Athlon 2000+ or something.
>>    
>>
>
>:)
>
>You can use as much power as you like, some processes like transcoding
>to MPEG4 will benefit from this. Nevertheless VDR often quotes the
>200MHz hardware requirement (which I believe). I can't even test this
>requirement w/o breaking into a computer museum ;)
>
>Persoanlly I have been using MythTV on a Duron/700 w/o having any
>performance problems (but I never transcode or archive anything, it's
>capture, view, delete ;)
>  
>
According to a page (http://mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythInfo) on 
mythtv.org, a pIII 500 should be about the minimum for live TV, which 
requires concurrent encoding and decoding. On the same page, though, he 
says he had a pIII 550 which was too slow for it to work quite right. 
Clearly it'll depend on RAM to some degree I imagine you really want to 
avoid swapping).

Live TV is what you want if you want to skip commercials. Of course if 
you don't mind commercials you can always just watch TV live, without 
the MythTV or Freevo, by taking it out of the video cabling chain. So if 
all you want to do is record shows and watch them later, then it sounds 
like something slower than a 550 might work.