Can computer be hardwired to MVP and then usb wireless to internet?

[scott]

Hi Gang - I got a radioshack MVP! thanks forn the tip. Couldn't have worked out better - my soyo mobo ( w/ integrated TV out) just blew for the last time and I've given up on that system.

I now have an old celeron 900 mhz system w/ 512 mem that I can put my Haupp card in and add my larger harddrive to. First question. Will this machine meet spec.? It's ok on the Mhz standpoint advertised by the media MVP, but it's a celeron. I don't know how that fits into the equation. I assume the MVP device takes over alot of the cpu load and hope that the older PC (running XP pro) will be ok... :confused:

Secondly - will the following setup work from a networking standpoint?
I have an cabinet with no hardwired network nearby. Can I put both the PC and the MVP in cabinet connected directly to each other with a cat5 cable? Then to allow for updating with Zapit, can I also add my existing wireless USB device to a USB port on the PC? Or will having cat5 and a wireless usb working at the same time confuse the hell out of the PC? :confused:

Note that I can just barely keep my home network figured out. I can, if neccessary or less technically complicated, run a cat5 cable to the tv cabinet and then put my hub/router/access point in the cabinet - connecting both the PC and the MVP to the hub...

Thanks in advance for the advice!

[jquinlan]

I now have an old celeron 900 mhz system w/ 512 mem that I can put my Haupp card in and add my larger harddrive to. First question. Will this machine meet spec.? It's ok on the Mhz standpoint advertised by the media MVP, but it's a celeron. I don't know how that fits into the equation. I assume the MVP device takes over alot of the cpu load and hope that the older PC (running XP pro) will be ok... :confused:

It will be fine if you are using the standard files of the MVP MPG 2 & 3. If you need to transcode AVI, Divx, ISO, DVD at real time you will not have enough power.

Secondly - will the following setup work from a networking standpoint? I have an cabinet with no hardwired network nearby. Can I put both the PC and the MVP in cabinet connected directly to each other with a cat5 cable? Then to allow for updating with Zapit, can I also add my existing wireless USB device to a USB port on the PC? Or will having cat5 and a wireless usb working at the same time confuse the hell out of the PC? :confused:

It should work fine with the USB/wireless for the Zapit EPG. It will be slow when it does update. The only problem I can see is the MVP needs a dynamic address asigned to it when it powers up. There is free software you can load on the PC, I can not remember the name at this time, but you will need it or another way to alocate an IP address to the MVP. The Hauppauge software has this built in but you cant use it with GBPVR at the same time. It should not confuse the PC with two netowrks, at least not XP.

[wtg]

You'll need to make sure your network cable is a crossover cable if you do the direct connect, but otherwise it should work fine.

The only problem I can see is the MVP needs a dynamic address asigned to it when it powers up. There is free software you can load on the PC, I can not remember the name at this time, but you will need it or another way to alocate an IP address to the MVP.

Turning on internet connection sharing between the network card device and the usb ethernet device should be sufficient for this. Just make sure the network card has 192.168.0.1 as it's address (192.168.1.1 will work too, I believe) and ICS will act as a dhcp server for whatever is hooked up to the other end of the crossover cable. Obviously the MVP doesn't need (or use) access to the net... it's just a simply way to get a dhcp server.

You should be able to find tons of info for setting up ICS on the web. (Try http://www.homenethelp.com/ics/index.asp as a starting point.) There are other freeware dhcp server solutions, but your simple setup they're more than you need.

[scott]

[QUOTE=jquinlan]It will be fine if you are using the standard files of the MVP MPG 2 & 3. QUOTE]

Thanks - this (MPG2&3) will allow for basic gbpvr functions - watching a recording, skipping ahead, etc?

[Tiger11]

I now have an old celeron 900 mhz system w/ 512 mem that I can put my Haupp card in and add my larger harddrive to. First question. Will this machine meet spec.? It's ok on the Mhz standpoint advertised by the media MVP, but it's a celeron. I don't know how that fits into the equation. I assume the MVP device takes over alot of the cpu load and hope that the older PC (running XP pro) will be ok... :confused:

From my experience, I think you should be fine with MPEG2, but this machine will not allow you to see Divx and AVI movies on your MediaMVP (to be honest with you, this is half-implemented feature from MVP themselves, so you are not missing much).

You can try to turn off unncessary Windows XP services (such as fast user switiching,,, google it, there are plenty of windows services that run that you will not need in your case).

Can I put both the PC and the MVP in cabinet connected directly to each other with a cat5 cable? Then to allow for updating with Zapit, can I also add my existing wireless USB device to a USB port on the PC? Or will having cat5 and a wireless usb working at the same time confuse the hell out of the PC? :confused:

Yes. That is what I have. Like previously mentioned though you need a crossover cable, not a regular straight cable. These are available on ebay for like $5 shipped. Check the manual of MVP online, you need to setup static IP for your WIRED connection for MVP to work.

As for the wireless side: If you have a wireless router, you don't need any additional setup on your machine (except of course, connecting the USB and installing the appropriate drivers / selecting your network). However, if your other machine which is connected to the internet has a USB wireless card, you need to run Windows home network setup and follow the onscreen instructions on both your original Host machine and this new machine. It is straight forward.

Your computer will not get confused between the two connections

[wtg]

FYI, I use a 1.1 GHz Celeron. Works fine for recording, PC playback of MPG and AVI files, and serving three MVPs, but it does not have the horsepower to transcode MPG to AVI on the fly and serve it to the MVP. However, serving an MPG file to the MVP can hardly be felt on the PC.

The only other problem I've really had with the celeron and MVP is that the screen rendering process GBPVR uses to create the menus for the MVP is very briefly very CPU intensive. For a fraction of a second I'd see the CPU peg. If I'm watching a video on the PC while someone's is using the MVP menus, it'll cause the video to stutter. I took the "Next Recording" panel out of the MVP's skin since it was updating the MVP screen every 5 seconds and screwed up playback on the PC. I also turned off the clock so it wouldn't stutter once a minute. However, I have no trouble watching a video on the PC while the MVP is watching something else.

It's only the menu rendering that's intensive, and since you're using the MVP as a front-end to the PC and not going to be using the PC directly for watching videos, you shouldn't even have the trouble I did.

Good luck,
Tim

[ram4x4nut]

Note that I can just barely keep my home network figured out. I can, if neccessary or less technically complicated, run a cat5 cable to the tv cabinet and then put my hub/router/access point in the cabinet - connecting both the PC and the MVP to the hub...

Thanks in advance for the advice!

Make sure you use a switch not a hub, a hub would be the slow point in a setup like this and may cause you problems.

[scott]

Thanks guys... I'm looking forward to trying the system out. Unfortionately, the 512 MB memory I had set aside are pc100 speed, not the PC133 that the machine is insisting upon - so I' going to give it a try with just 128 MB, maybe 268 MB memory!

Maybe Dell's new $100 Shipping charge that turned me off from getting a new system won't feel so bad after I spend a couple hundred hours trying the get this to work with such an under-memoried machine!

[wtg]

I suspect the machines lack of memory will keep it from being usable, especially if you only manage 128meg. I know for a fact that you'll have issues with some plug-ins (My Videos will be out of the question based on how it currently allocates memory), and while I'm not sure what the exact memory footprint of GBPVR is without any plug-ins, I think the recording service alone take 50-70 meg on my PC.

Since sub has mentioned he tests without plugins, maybe he can tell you what the minimum memory footprint is.