GBPVR vs. MythTV

[nak]

Just to follow up on this thread I started a few days ago, where I talked about installing GBPVR after not having the greatest luck with MythTV....

Spent probably between 10 - 12 hours installing software, configuring GBPVR, experimenting with A/V decoders, and general poking around, and I've now got a pretty good system. It's an HD (OTA only) system, and it works great thus far, and was fairly light on the wallet. The cheap nVidia 6200 works just fine, which was my main concern. (If you get a 6200 with 128 MB RAM for this purpose, be sure to get the AGP, and not the PCI-E. see http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html)

I use the PureVideo decoder for video, and AC3filter decoder for audio, and they seem to play nice together. The video card does a lot of the work, so my 3.2 Ghz CPU is quite untaxed, so I've got a very responsive system even when playing video.

Haven't touched or tweaked it for about four days, and everything running stable. Once I get my IR receiver this weekend so I can use my remote, http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Hardware/WinLirc , then I'll be ready for the ultimate test of having my wife try using it.

[Alfb]

I personally think the 6200 is on the low side for HD video. You may find a good combination but its one of the slowest GPUs from Nvidia with hardware decode. I have a 6200 AGP version and have similar problems and have never been able to completely fix them. Its not so much jittery eventhough that does happen as I have a line that moves up and down the screen at random. In any case, good luck.

[nak]

Sorry to hear your 6200 hasn't worked out for you. Fortunately for me, my 6200 has performed flawlessly once I got done tinkering with various decoders. When I was messing around with different decoders, I'd get occasional hiccups and some flat out unwatchable output, but nothing bad since I settled on Purevideo with AC3filter for audio. I'll count myself lucky.

I don't know much about GPUs, but a line randomly going up and down the screen doesn't sound like a problem with GPU speed.

[Zato]

Please let us know how it goes with the wife.. hehe.

I started my box with a cheap 6200 w/256 meg of ram and I could never get the video quality to be tolerable for me. It was just a bit "fuzzy" and noticably less sharp than regular TV. I replaced it with an ATI 9600 and never looked back .