Hello all,
I'm in the early stages of planning to build a dedicated PVR after I upgrade my main computer later this year (hopefully). I've researched several of the diy pvr solutions and really like the looks of gbpvr. When I first found this site, I thought that I saw system requirements listed somewhere (a P-III 733 comes to mind), but now I can't find them. Are the minimum/recommended system specs listed somewhere? Thanks.
I just upgraded to one of those socket LGA 775 celeron D's at 2.66ghz & it moves pretty good. In fact, it will sometimes beat out my 1.8 ghz Athlon 64 when converting files to Xvid. Not bad when you consider the cheaper price (About $90 online). I'm not sure though if the DDR2 could also be a speed factor.
It will allow me to make a recording & stream an xvid file to an mvp using the Hauppauge client & as long as I set the processes like comclean & comskip to be lower than the MVP client it doesn't stutter. Much.
A better CPU would of been nice, but I really think investing in a bigger HD & keeping any recordings I'll want to watch on the MVP in mpeg2 format is the way to go right now.
Quote:Intel PIII 900MHz, 256KB L2 and 512MB of PC133 SDRAM FSB 133MHz - average
Excellent! I was hoping 900MHz would be usable (my current system which I'm planning to convert to the PVR is an Athlon Thunderbird 900 w/ 256MB PC100, planning to add an additional 256-512MB RAM). I figured I'd start modestly with 1 tuner, the PVR 150. Then, once the WAF was sufficiently high, I could start adding, which would of course necessitate an upgrade at some point. By then, she should be hooked and I can push that through with little resistance. Bwa ha ha.
Thanks for the feedback.
tipstir Wrote:
- Intel PIII 500MHz, 512KB L2 and 768MB PC100 of SDRAM FSB 100MHz - fair
- Intel PIII 900MHz, 256KB L2 and 512MB of PC133 SDRAM FSB 133MHz - average
- Intel PIV 2.4GHz, 1MB L2 and 1GB of PC2100 DDRAM FSB 533MHz Dual Channel - Good
- AMD Sempron 64-bit 2600+, 128KB L2 and 1GB PC2700 DDRAM FSB 800MHz Dual Channel - Better
Does this mean an AMD K6-2+ 550MHz* (my current set-up) has no chance? *I may well overclock this.
I doubt the cpu would be able to handle live tv with o.s.d. etc but I'm prepared to be corrected as always!
nemulate Wrote:I doubt the cpu would be able to handle live tv with o.s.d. etc
I don't need live TV via the PC - I'll be using a TV as a monitor & can always switch that to watch TV direct.
I just want to record TV & playback the recorded files.
If I can use huffyUV for compression/decompression then that would help as it runs OK on similar spec system
http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu...ffyuv.html
Well difficult for me to say as my spec is quite different, spose the only way to tell is try it. If you hang around for a while no doubt the author of the software, Sub will be around and he can advise you better! Think he lives in NZ so probably in bed at the mo!
I was running GBPVR on a slot A athlon 750.
The menus were sluggish though this could of been the graphic card also.
For recording & play back seperatly it worked fairly well.
It would take a while to cut the commercials out of a file but it did it.
The big problem I had was back to back recordings on different channels.
With comskip running during recordings the cpu was tanked & the channel change signals sent to the directv via serial cable would come too slowly.
So a lot of times the first number would be forgotton & the channel would swith to whatever the last 2 number's were.
After my upgrade to the celeron D no problems though now i'm starting to wish I had spent the extra for a P4.
One other thing. 512mb ram is the minimum IMO.
Some of the more graphical skins seem to really suck up the ram.
1. What's the minimum requirements for playback of HD content?
My laptop can do 720p playback, but it can't handle transport streams from a 1080i channel. It a PM 1.6GHz, 1GB w/no pagefile, ATI R300SE, wired LAN.
2. How many concurrent SDTV/HDTV recordings can occur before frames are skipped/lost on:
a. a dedicated, local, non-RAID disk?
b. a dedicated, local, 2 disk RAID0 array?
c. a 100Mb NAS?
My math says 1 SD show is ~500KB/s, 1 HD show is ~2MB/s, LAN is 10MB/s best case, and a disk should do at least 30MB/s. If I estimated 50% context switching, you'd think all three scenarios could handle 2 each of SD/HD simultaneous recording.
Has anyone hit the bandwidth limit of their PVR topology?