[mythtvnz] Basic hardware help

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:32:57 +1200, you wrote:

>Ok
>
>Thanks for all comments
>
>Sorry to be asking all these dumb questions, but I have got some more.
>
>About ram. I will get 256 as soon as I can. Upgrade to 512 if its
>available and needed. If I make a propoer system (built specially with
>new or near new hardware) 1GB will be the minimum.
>
>Hauppauge 150/500. The 500 has two tuners allowing you to watch two
>channels at once. Will my puny little 1.2Ghz allow me to watch 1
>channel while recording another, or record two chanells while watching
>neither? If not then I will get a 150 which my hardware can use. Is
>this right?

The 150/500 cards have builtin MPEG2 decoders, so all the hard work is
done on the card.  All the rest of the box really needs to do is
transfer the data to the disk, so the impact of running multiple
recordings at the same time is relatively small.  That means the CPU
can be mostly dedicated to the playback where it is needed.  That
said, I have no experience with a box as small as yours, so I can not
say for sure that recording 2 channels would work at the same time as
playing back one.  If your hard disk is not a fairly modern 7200 rpm
one, you might be starting to work it hard too with 3 video streams at
once.

>If I got a 150/500 and then got a freeview card, could I watch most of
>the channels on freeview and get Prime of the 150/500?

Yes.

>Which dedicated distro (knoppmyth/mythdora/mythbuntu (are there more))
>has the most drivers built in. I have dial up (dont laugh too hard)
>and so to minimise downloading I would like a distro that has just
>about everything built in. Do any of them have libdvdcss built in?

Mythbuntu does not have libdvdcss builtin, but does have it as part of
the setup where you can just select it and it downloads and installs.
It is tiny, so downloading it will not be a problem even on a dialup
connection.  However, Mythbuntu is currently in transition from Gutsy
to Hardy and from MythTV 0.20.2 to 0.21.  The Hardy/0.21 Alpha 4 disk
I downloaded is not really stable as far as I can tell.  I am trying
it out on my Asus G1S notebook, to see if I can get a Hauppauge WinTV
HVR 900 USB tuner to work with Freeview.

The stable Hardy 8.04 / 0.21 release should be available next month.
You can install 0.21 on top of the Mythbuntu Gutsy version, but only
by downloading all the packages - it would be far too much to want to
do on a dialup connection.  And you really do want MythTV 0.21 -
installing 0.20.x at this point would be a bit silly as 0.21 is
significantly improved and has things needed for using Freeview DVB-T.
KnoppMyth is promising a 0.21 release "within a week".  I have never
tried MythDora, so someone else will need to tell you about that.

>Why are PCI graphics cards bad? what is XVMC?

The PCI bus has very limited bandwidth when compared to the bandwidth
used for video.  That is why AGP and then PCIe were invented.  A PCI
bus has insufficient bandwidth to handle the video traffic for doing
very much.  AGP is *much* better, especially AGP 2X and AGP 4X.  Your
hardware old enough that it is unlikely to support 4X, but if it has
an AGP slot, you really need to use an AGP card, not a PCI one.  There
should be cheap ones available on TradeMe.  Watch out for the voltage
specs - AGP is 5V, and I think AGP 4X is only 3.3V, which older PCs do
not support.

XvMC is a way of offloading more of the video work for MPEG2 playback
onto the GPU on the video card:

  http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC

Your video drivers need to support it.  If they don't, then you may
have problems with running out of main CPU as it is not nearly as good
as a GPU at doing that sort of work.

>Ok
>
>Thanks
>
>Matthew
>
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