[ale] Best processor for MythTV?

[Jesse Guardiani]

Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> Barlow, Jim D wrote:
>> Hi Charles,
>>
>> For the past year and change I've been using a PVR 350 with 2.4 (pre HT) P4  and a 5200 Nvidia on Gentoo.   It works great.   I don't use the hardware decode, as it was more time to mess with than I had and have had no pauses or glitches with software decode.   You should be in good shape.
>>
>> - Jim
>>
>>> Heh. Well, I missed the $80 300 gb drives at Fry's. But I got a 400 gb one for $130 or so.
>>> After actually doing my research I found that chip sizing for MythTV is kind of a Can o' Worms ( http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1 ), >and depends heavily on what PVR card you choose. So thanks for the advice, and now I understand that the question is perhaps deeper than I thought.  Anyways, >at Fry's I picked up a 2.4 ghz P4 for this machine. From what I can see, this should be more than adequate for use with a Hauppauge card using hardware mpeg2 >encoding. I'm still on the fence about the PVR card -- the 350 with its hardware mpeg2 decoding is tempting, but I'm warned that's deprecated. Heck, it might be >best with that kind o' muscle to just do the decoding in software, which makes me lean toward the 250 or 150.  Of course, I'm really motivated to try to fix up the >FM radio stuff, because I'd actually use that..
> 
> Me too. I run a 350 with an nvidia 5200. If I change anything, it'll be to swap the 350 for a 500
> so I can record 2 channels at the same time. It's too bad they haven't come out with the HDTV
> equivalent of a 500 yet. :)

BTW, and correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think another advantage with using a 350 or a 250 is
that you get closed captioning support in MythTV directly. So you can use this card with an nvidia card
and still have CC support. I don't think MythTV support CC from the 150/500 yet. Also, this support was
added in 0.19, I think, so 0.18.1 users are out of luck.


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