[ale] Best processor for MythTV?

Jesse Guardiani jesse at guardiani.us
Fri May 19 11:16:07 EDT 2006


Charles Shapiro wrote:
> Yeah, that's pretty ok helpful. Looks like the Shuttle comes with an ATI 
> Radeon 9100 chipset on board,


ATI has no support for XvMC under linux, so you'll be running XV which
uses more CPU. This can be problematic for combined front/backends if
you have a really slow CPU, so be careful.


> so I reckon that's what I'm going with. 
> There's only one card slot in the box, and of course that's already 
> taken.  I'd very much like to experiment with the FM radio stuff -- I 
> ain't much for TV, but I likes my radio. I reckon I'm actually lookin' 
> at a PVR 150 then -- thanks for the tip. 

I'd actually like to get into the radio stuff too. But unfortunately radio
isn't very well supported in MythTV. I think this stems from lack of interest
as well as lack of good hardware drivers. For example, my PVR 350 has a radio,
but it doesn't work in version 5.x of the ivtv driver, which I'm forced to use
right now because I need support for the white header A/V cable set.

My 350's radio was working with version 4.x of the ivtv driver, but I don't
know if the PVR 150's radio is supported or not. In addition, I think there
is a radio plugin for MythTV, but it's unsupported and probably unmaintained.

There was talk a few months ago on the users list about adding radio support
to mythtv as a regular tuner, thus allowing scheduled recordings, but I don't
think anyone actually bit the bullet and coded the functionality.


> I might go with a separate front-end (maybe an old X-Box) in the future, 
> but for this first cut it's all gonna be in one box. The Zen is s'posed 
> to be pretty quiet, in any case.

Yes, I hear the xbox makes a nice SDTV frontend. It's too slow for HDTV though.


> But what processor is just fast enough?

My 933mhz P3 is plenty fast for SDTV (mpeg2 and mpeg4), even without XvMC,
but not fast enough for HDTV, even with XvMC.

The Xbox does mpeg2 SDTV fine, and it's a 733mhz. I'm not sure if it can
handle mpeg4 though, and I'm not sure if it requires XvMC to get the job
done.

For more CPU info, you can check out the XvMC page I authored on the MythTV
wiki:
     http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC

Also, keep in mind that commercial flagging jobs and DVD burning jobs will
chew up a ton of CPU. This can be a problem on combined front/backend boxes
because it might affect playback and introduce stutter.


-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at guardiani.us




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