How processor intensive is recording

[edi]

Hi All,

I've currently got an Athlon 2500+ PC that I'm strongly considering using as a PVR by buying a bigger hard disk and a dual digital tuner card (The Pinnacle PCTV Dual DVB-T Pro PCI Tv Tuner). However, I still want to be able to use my PC as a PC which will include some web browsing and games.

What I'm interested to know is how much system resource is used when recording TV programs to the hard disk. Is it going to be impossible to do this when playing games at the same time or will the TV card do most of the work for me?

Does anyone have any experience of doing something like this, is it a lost cause?

[dgeezer]

I have an athlon 3000? i think which actually serves fairly well as a pvr. I use a PVR-150 here in the US which is a hardwae decoding card. I see almost no drain on the pc when recording. Even my old athlon 1200 was able to record just fine. Play back however was not too good.

I'm not a gamer so I don't know how much this would be affected. If the card is fully supported ( check the Wiki) I don't think you'll have any problems.

[HarryH3]

I just checked the CPU load during recording. It varies between 0 and 3% while recording a show. I'm running a Hauppauge PVR-150 on a 2.6 GHz P4. The hardware decoder on the tuner card is doing most of the work, so the PC doesn't seem loaded down at all. I use this system all the time and never notice a difference in performance, either while recording or when my wife is watching shows from this PC via the MediaMVP streaming over the network.

[martint123]

DVB-T is almost "read from board, write to disk" virtually no processing is involved AFAIK. If you're into these enormous games, then it might be an idea to have a separate hard drive for recordings as you seem to be intending to do anyway.

[Deusxmachina]

My brother used a Pentium II or whatever at 233mhz (yes, I wrote the mhz correctly) for an HTPC with MVP no problem thanks to the Hauppage card doing the encoding. That was for SDTV, of course.

Recording HDTV doesn't take much juice either because the TV tuner just dumps the mpeg stream to the hard drive. Playing 1080p on an athlon 2500+ might be a problem, though.

With separate hard drives, should work fine for SDTV. And if it doesn't, then toss a Pentium II 233mhz together for a dedicted HTPC, I guess.

[wtg]

To reiterate and reassure you based on your PC, when record digital recordings are simply written straight to disk. There no more CPU overhead than your network and hard drive require.

Playback should work for you ok too. I use an AMD 2500+ for HD playback with excellent results, but your video card has a significant bearing on how satisfied you'll be. It doesn't take an expensive card, but if it's real old, motherboard integrated, or doesn't support directx 9 natively, you'll probably have issues. Definitely search the boards first.

[edi]

Thanks for the replies guys, pretty much certain that i'll go ahead now

In terms of graphics card I've got a radeon 9700 which afaik has no HD accel but hopefully i'll have updated the PC before that becomes to much of an issue!

Thanks again

[mian]

Hi All,

I've currently got an Athlon 2500+ PC that I'm strongly considering using as a PVR by buying a bigger hard disk and a dual digital tuner card (The Pinnacle PCTV Dual DVB-T Pro PCI Tv Tuner). However, I still want to be able to use my PC as a PC which will include some web browsing and games.

What I'm interested to know is how much system resource is used when recording TV programs to the hard disk. Is it going to be impossible to do this when playing games at the same time or will the TV card do most of the work for me?

Does anyone have any experience of doing something like this, is it a lost cause?

Before I upgraded, I had a 2000+, and my only performance problem was an ancient and slow Hard Drive (5400 rpm). How much ram do you have? Swap file mania can be really annoying.

I don't know anything about the tv tuner you listed, but so long as it does hardware encoding of both the audio and video, you probably won't even notice recording in the background.

I still have an ATI 9600pro 256mb. No issues.