[ale] Best processor for MythTV?

[H P Ladds]

These thoughts FYI from a person up to his elbows in building his first Myth
Machine. My Linux skills are intermediate at best --  other ALErs please
feel free to correct me. (No tact necessary).

1. Most wives would take to Tivo more quickly than MythTV.

2. HD is on the cusp of being truly "doable." It's not "there" yet. I have
yet to read of 100% satisfaction with HD and MythTV. (More success with
mplayer and xine.) For the present, HDTV w/MythTV is an academic excercise
-- no real reason to try-it otherwise.

Many MythTV users reduce the workload of their CPU's by dumping much of the
video processing off onto the video card. Dumping the processing work onto
the video card is accomplished with XvMC. XvMC can improve video quality and
also reduce the CPU's usage from 95+%  down to -50%. This is particularly
evident when processing HD. HOWEVER configuring XvMC is a bear.  You might
invest in a big bad video card rather than CPU (to help with cooling issues
perhaps). But again --  mileage varies greatly with XvMC.

I have yet to learn of any benefit to using version .19 over .18. Some say
XvMC is broken in .19; this is not an accepted fact.

Preston

On 5/19/06, Charles Shapiro <hooterpincher at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey man, after your astounding presentation at ALE in April I was inspired
> to start building my own mythTV box.  The Grand Plan is to change my wife's
> TV viewing habits so that they intrude less into my life.
>
> I've acquired a  Shuttle "Zen" ST62K XPC barebones (
> http://sys.us.shuttle.com/ModelsK.aspx) and I'm now wondering what
> processor to put into it. Money is not as important to me as cooling. I'd
> also like it to have enough muscle to do HDTV when the Dread Day of HDTV
> Reckoning comes.   After I get the machine running I'll use KnoppMyth for
> the install.
>
> I figure on maxing out the memory (heck, it's cheap), and starting out
> with a 40-gb hard drive I have lyin' around the house. If my wife takes to
> this thing, I'll probably actually spend money on the hard-drive part. And
> of course I was gonna get a Hauppauge PVR 350 for the actual video
> encoding/decoding stuff. I have no current plans to add on the khoul hi-tech
> bellz & whistles Jesse demonstrated. Unless, of course, I get real
> ambitious..
>
> Your thoughts?
>
> -- CHS
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...