MythTV hw question

[Dave Johnson]

Paul Lussier writes:
> 
> So, before I start spending a ton of money on new hardware, I'd like
> to play around with MythTV a little.  I have an old PIII 300Mhz system
> collecting dust somewhere.  Would that be sufficient to play with if I
> threw a little memory and a new PVR-350 at it?
> 
> I don't expect any great performance from it, and would expect to
> migrate the video card over to a new system once I figure out what I
> was doing.

That's probably fine for a backend, but may be a bit slow for decoding
for the frontend.  I've noticed cpu power requirements for playing
are perportional to the bitrate of the MPEG2 so you can always crank
down the bitrate setting when recording to find what it can handle.

At least on my PVR-250 you can set any width/height/bitrate you want
and it'll do MPEG2 hardware encoding on that.  You should have no
problems cranking them way down just for the experimentation phase.
At least that'll give you time to play around with the functionality
even if the video quality isn't great.

-- 
Dave