Min specs for making PVR

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mailmarshall

349 posts

Ultimate Geek

#14907 26-Jul-2007 10:25

Hi

I have an AMD XP 2600 (2ghtz) Athalon with 512mg RAM and 320 gig HD. I am thinking of making this into a PVR. Am thinking of getting the Hauppage cards as they have onboard hardware encoding.

Not sure whetehr I want to go MythTV or MediaPortal. Have been told MediaPortal is very resource hungry...

Do you think the machine will be Ok to run a PVR or should I be looking at something more grunty?

closetgeek

39 posts

Geek

#79744 26-Jul-2007 10:53

If you're going for a card with a hardware encoder on board (such as the Hauppauge PVR cards) then your machine will be more than OK. Even the entry level PVR150 card will do 100% of the processing on board for viewing/capture/pause live TV so CPU grunt is unneccesary. Good luck!

sbiddle

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#79745 26-Jul-2007 10:59

If you're going to use XP for basic analogue TV with a Hauppauge 150 or 500 it'll be fine. If you want to upgrade to DVB-S or DVB-T in the future and need software decoding for the MPEG2 or MPEG4 signal then you will find it's underpowered.

I ran GB-PVR on a Sempron 2800 for the past year found it fine, I've just upgraded to a X2 4800 and new motherboard primarily because I wanted to play with Vista Ultimate as a PVR and in preparation for the MPEG4 DVB-T launch early next year which is very CPU intensive using software decoding.

mailmarshall

349 posts

Ultimate Geek

#79757 26-Jul-2007 11:40

Thanks for the reply guys.

SBIDDLE: I was toying with the idea of connecting the SKY satellite to a PC card capable of doing DVb-S (such as the Hauppage 3000). This way I could also get the FREEVIEW channels (apperently people with SKY aerials will be able to get FREEVIEW in Aug??).

So do you reckon this machine might not be grunty enough to record FREEVIEW??

DVB-T is next year and I haven't seen any cards around that do MPEG4 hardware encoding yet.. but that doesn't mean they dont exist!!

Nety

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#79758 26-Jul-2007 11:44

hmm ok I have been planning to use a P4 2.8 H/T with a gig of ram for a PVR next year. I want to connect both Telstra cable and DVB-T. sbiddle are you saying that it will not be enough to do this?

Media centre PC - Case Silverstone LC16M with 2 X 80mm AcoustiFan DustPROOF, MOBO Gigabyte MA785GT-UD3H, CPU AMD X2 240 under volted, RAM 4 Gig DDR3 1033, HDD 120Gig System/512Gig data, Tuners 2 X Hauppauge HVR-3000, 1 X HVR-2200, Video Palit GT 220, Sound Realtek 886A HD (onboard), Optical LiteOn DH-401S Blue-ray using TotalMedia Theatre Power Corsair VX Series, 450W ATX PSU OS Windows 7 x64

sbiddle

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#79759 26-Jul-2007 11:53

mailmarshall: Thanks for the reply guys.

SBIDDLE: I was toying with the idea of connecting the SKY satellite to a PC card capable of doing DVb-S (such as the Hauppage 3000). This way I could also get the FREEVIEW channels (apperently people with SKY aerials will be able to get FREEVIEW in Aug??).

So do you reckon this machine might not be grunty enough to record FREEVIEW??

DVB-T is next year and I haven't seen any cards around that do MPEG4 hardware encoding yet.. but that doesn't mean they dont exist!!

Your specs are probably about the bare minimum for running a DVB-S card and recording in MPEG2. If you're going to run something such as GB-PVR it may pay to have a look at the GB-PVR forums or ask there how well it will work.

As for DVB-T virtually any DVB-T PCI card or USB tuner will work with our DVB-T Freeview. In the UK where the BBC MPEG4 trial has been running people have had success with most devices, all you need is an MPEG4 codec with as CoreAVC to do the decoding however people have reported problems with anything less than around a X2 3800 with some people saying you're best to go for something faster so anything less than a dual core Intel may not be sufficiant either.

I don't know whether you'll really see any cards with hardware MPEG4 decoding, with CPU speeds now it doesn't necessarily make sence for hardware manufacturers to include extra hardware when the CPU can do the job.

lchiu7

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#79764 26-Jul-2007 12:38

As sbiddle notes, if you use a card with hardware MPEG2 encoding support, then the Athlon 2600 would be fine. I have been using an Athlon 2000 for a while and gbpvr and I am able to record analogue TV using a Hauppauge card and watch divx content over a network at the same time with the CPU handling it fine.

The only issue for me with this machine is an inability play HD content smoothly (like QT trailers in 720p or WMV9 720p videos - just a bit jerky)

For various reasons I am doing a slow upgrade to a Sempron 2600 (socket 754). While not much faster I hope that additional speed will alleviate my HD content issue and the new MB will allow me to install a DVB-S card (current MB only have one PCI slot filled with the Hauppauge card) to record Freeview content.

Larry

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execute22

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#79820 26-Jul-2007 16:57

I can you tell you from experience that machine will be fine for Mediaportal:
http://mcraenz.googlepages.com/mppvr

AMD XP2500, 1GB, 320GB SATA, NVFX5200, 2xDVB-S, 1xPVR-150

Runs like a dream. Even recording 4 channels at once. The main thing with mediaportal is to make sure you have a video card that support DX9, even a cheapy like mine (FX5200)

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mailmarshall

349 posts

Ultimate Geek

#79975 27-Jul-2007 12:40

Thanks execute22

Jeez mate you have gone through a fair bit of effort I must say!!! Great explanation on ya website.

My specs are:
AMD XP 2600+ (2GHz)

512MB DDR RAM
320gig HD

Inno3D GeForce4 Ti4200, 128MB DDR, TVOut/VideoIn

Hauppage 150 (for analogue, yet to purchase)
Hauppage 3000 (for DVB-S Freeview stuff on SKY, yet to purchase)

I see there are various flavours of PVR software around. Ideally I want to stay with something windowsy e.g MediaPortal or GB-PVR. MythTV looks good but I dunno a thing about Linux.