Minimum hardware req

[sub]

It'll be a bit sluggish, but should work.

[stefan]

I am interested in minimum hardware requirements, as I am a newbie to PVR. I hve just bought a PVR350, installed into a spare work Pentium 4 PC (256Mb RAM) running GB-PVR, and it works just fine.

So, I am looking to push this into a dedicated box. Thinking along the lines of a VIA M10000 mobo with 512 Mb RAM, 250Gb HDD.

Does that sound about right? I read that less than 1GhZ makes the GBPVR menus sluggish. This box will be dedicated to PVR/ MP3 etc. I only want TVOUT, no PC monitor, and pref no keyboard or mouse (running GBPVR through Hauppauge remote)

Looking for best bang per buck, quiet machine in TV rack, always on, stable etc.

I have this exact setup, although I have a (wireless) keyboard and mouse stashed away in the living room table... don't use it for more than maintenance, though ;-)

The m10000 has about the same horsepower as a pentium 600Mhz. The menus are a bit sluggish, but I have actually never seen gbpvr on a state-of-the-art machine, so I can't really compare.

Depending on your luck, you probably won't get the 350 and m10000 to play along too well. I gave up using the tv-out, since it was *way* too unstable. Crashes were frequent. Watching live tv was impossible. It crashed all the time (like after every few channel switches). Hard rebooting was the only solution.

As I said, I gave up. Now using the mobo tv-out. Works like a charm. Not one single crash or lockup since. Never missed a show. I don't have it on at all times, I use hibernation mode when not watching/recording anything. The quality of the tv-out is not nearly as good as the 350's (which, on the other hand, is perfect), but I've learned to live with it. Today I don't think about it at all.

Now, another issue with the m10000 is bios upgrading. I would recommend you do a search for bios upgrading in the forums over at via arena before you decide just which memory modules you buy for your epia. If you want to buy one after reading the posts. I never dared upgrading the bios even though I want to, in order to get a hold of the new tv-out drivers...

My five cents.

[A_Brass]

I'm running a low spec'ed machine. Works very well. I wouldn't load to many plugins but recording, playback and xvid/divx decoding all works.

The big bottleneck for me looks like my memory (only 256mb) and my video card, ATI RagePro 32mb. But I'm able to run VMR9 instead of overlay so I get some of the nice visuals.

I'm also able to serve the one MVP (mpeg2 only) I have. But this computer wont do Divx/Xvid to the MVP.

check my sig for config.

[dpettipas]

Thanks folks glad to hear it will work
The plextor m402u has a hardware encoder for mpeg 1,2,4 & divx but does not come with any pvr software.so i needed to to find a pvr software that would work on a low spec
machine.