GPVR running fine on 600MHz PIII

[jksmurf]

If you setup your PIII to work with GBPVR it will and you can tweak the Registry manually without using third-party tweak tools to speed up the system.

Mine's also a PIII 1.2GHz (ASUS TUSL2-C with 512MB RAM (max for that Board). Works fine, although I have a playback glitch I am trying to fix at the moment.

Tipstir, I'd be very interested in those Tweaks that you consider essential, I know there are a few sites that say disable this that and the other service, but there are so many (often conflicting) ideas and I don't want to disable something that could stuff GB-PVR or my wireless network to the mediaMVP. As you have a GB-PVR system working with a wireless MVP, do you have a reccomended list of simple ones that you consider necessary to disable?

Cheers

k.

[borgs5]

[QUOTE=borgs5]

Wow, that's dedication. We should start a donation or something, to get this man a cheap Ghz box capable of playing the recorded stuff back...anyone that manually burns recorded shows just to watch them, wanting to write software to automate the copy/burn process...that's just too much! Then again, UK television is probably much more worthwhile watching than our lame US reality shows and sitcoms.

Cheers Zod,

I'm not that short of cash really, I just wanted a machine that I could run fanless in the lounge. I tested playback with a 1Ghz Athlon I have using TV-out and the quality was very poor.

The copy / burn process is a bit of a pain but we tend to end up with a backlog of programmes to watch anyway so I do them in bulk. I must admit I would quite like to be able to pause Live TV and I am contemplating whether to fork out on a PVR 350. The one thing that stops me (well apart from the high price) is that I had so much trouble with the PVR 150 - it only works properly on 1 of my 3 pcs.

I dunno about having better TV here, most of the programmes I watch are American anyway!

Cheers

[erik]

Instead of copy/burn you could consider using a networked media player.

Install a UPnP server on the GBPVR machine, share the directories where you record over UPnP and you can playback from anywhere in the house.
Of course using the hauppauge MPV adds the remote UI but the system will be too slow on such a slow PC.

I use this setup and the very slow CPU (slower then a 400MHz Celeron) can easily serve 3 simultanious playbacks.

However, do not use slow disks because that will not work

[borgs5]

Instead of copy/burn you could consider using a networked media player.

Install a UPnP server on the GBPVR machine, share the directories where you record over UPnP and you can playback from anywhere in the house.
Of course using the hauppauge MPV adds the remote UI but the system will be too slow on such a slow PC.

I use this setup and the very slow CPU (slower then a 400MHz Celeron) can easily serve 3 simultanious playbacks.

However, do not use slow disks because that will not work

Cheers guys,

I'm hoping to do something very similar to that when I get my XBox 360. This is assuming that the XBox 360 will be able to play the mpeg2 files that the PVR 150 generates. I wonder whether I would be able to pause Live TV using that setup?

I've also now got my EPIA (and the rest of the hifi separates) inside a wooden cabinet (back removed for air flow). An IR repeater should be arriving soon so that I can control the equipment with the wooden door closed. Had I known I was going to do this I probably would have bought a more powerful, fanned EPIA in the first place as it cuts down a LOT of the fan noise. I may still do that if the XBox 360 doesn't give me the functionality I require.

[box2k2]

I think I win!

Been running on a Pentium 450Mhz, Geforce2, 96Mb RAM, PVR350 & MCE remote (Blasting NTL STB)

Runs but real S L O W!

Upgraded it last week to 1.7GHz, mostly to solve xvid encoding issues.

[ChrisCook]

well I just want to use it for Watching ripped torrent tv.

[Heartburnkid]

Sorry to bump such an old thread, but I've been trying to set up a low-powered GBPVR box, and I could use a few tips...

I'm basing the rig around a Dell Optiplex GX1 I got for free from work. The machine has a 500MHz PIII (I tried to upgrade to a 1GHz and fried the mobo; fortunately, work had more spares they were trying to get rid of) and 256MB RAM. I've added a 250GB HD, an Avermedia M179, and a GeForce FX5200, and put Windows XP SP2 on there (as without a modern OS, the ancient BIOS won't recognize the drive), as well as the PureVIDEO decoder. I at first attempted to use the machine with a Packard Bell Media Remote receiver, a generic universal remote, IREX, and WinLIRC; however, when using this combo, the remote would not function while playing recorded shows or watching live TV. I tried switching over to a Media Player-compatible remote, and this works better; however, the remote will occasionally not respond for several seconds after pushing the button while watching live TV (the rest of the time, there's a 1/2 second lag time, and I can live with that). As well, the video sometimes stutters for no apparent reason.

I see in this thread that some have gotten GBPVR to run on similar systems, so I was curious if anybody could help me get this bad boy running in a more stable and predictable manner. I realize that my experience won't be quite as good as somebody with a more powerful machine, but I'd love some help getting a reliable and enjoyable experience out of it.

Failing this, I was thinking of building a machine around a Mini-ITX motherboard (just because I have an old broken-down NES moldering in the closet which would be perfect to house the beast). I've read elsewhere that the 1GHZ C3 boards are too underpowered, despite the hardware MPEG2 decoding; can anybody enlighten me as to the problems with these boards? Has anybody tried a C7 board?

[sub]

however, the remote will occasionally not respond for several seconds after pushing the button while watching live TV (the rest of the time, there's a 1/2 second lag time, and I can live with that). As well, the video sometimes stutters for no apparent reason.

That could be normal, so it depends if those several second delays occur consistantly in certain place. If so, you probably find its doing quite a bit of processing in those places, and those running faster machines dont notice it, but on your older box this is noticably slower.

Failing this, I was thinking of building a machine around a Mini-ITX motherboard (just because I have an old broken-down NES moldering in the closet which would be perfect to house the beast). I've read elsewhere that the 1GHZ C3 boards are too underpowered, despite the hardware MPEG2 decoding; can anybody enlighten me as to the problems with these boards? Has anybody tried a C7 board?

The recommended minimum CPU for GB-PVR is a 1GHz PIII class CPU. Unfortuntalely the 1GHz C3 boards are about the equivalent of your 500MHz PIII - a bit too slow for GB-PVR in my book. Even with their built in MPEG2 decoding accelleration they only provide marginally enough CPU to decode video, and you tend to see stuttering when it needs to display OSD graphics etc.

The newer, higher GHz EPIAs may perform better but I've not tested any of these.

[Heartburnkid]

That could be normal, so it depends if those several second delays occur consistantly in certain place. If so, you probably find its doing quite a bit of processing in those places, and those running faster machines dont notice it, but on your older box this is noticably slower.

I'm not too sure on this one; I wasn't monitoring my CPU utilization at the time, but I was testing by watching a basketball game, and during the game (with lost of fast pans, close ups, etc) it seemed to work very well. Both the problems I mentioned actually occurred during the commercials (where there wasn't a lot of rapid scene changes, fast action, etc. going on).

[K.S.]

I at first attempted to use the machine with a Packard Bell Media Remote receiver, a generic universal remote, IREX, and WinLIRC; however, when using this combo, the remote would not function while playing recorded shows or watching live TV. I tried switching over to a Media Player-compatible remote, and this works better; however, the remote will occasionally not respond for several seconds after pushing the button while watching live TV (the rest of the time, there's a 1/2 second lag time, and I can live with that).

remotes are a problem on low resources. problem with all the apps: they are not really handling IRQ (which should at least kick in for COM-Port/WinLIRC recievers). only way i got that to work with acceptable delays was with girder & IgorPlugin (serial, handles ring0 prio, that's what is missing in other apps). do a search on the net, you might find girder329b somewhere out there, that was the last freeware version.