System requirements for mvp

[djtaylor]

What about OSD? On my computer the recording get's really choppy when any OSD is displayed.

I had a crappy Nvidia card on my box, OSD on the PC was awful, very choppy. On the MVP, no problem.

[stefan]

Cool... I found a place here in sweden which offers no shipping charges, and I can try the thing, if I don't like it and haven't destroyed it, I can return it free of charge (they actually pay shipping costs then, too) within 14 days.

[stefan]

Now I just have to convince the wife it's worth the money ;-)

[djtaylor]

Now I just have to convince the wife it's worth the money ;-)

Won't be a problem, it was my wife that wanted it when I told her that she would be able to do all the cool stuff on the tele's in the lounge and upstairs.

She has just started watching a film that she had part watched the other day, she loves gbpvr and the MVP is the most wife friendly gizmo.

David.

[stefan]

Yeah... well, so far we only have one tv, the computer is sitting right next to it (and I can't do much about it, since I have to have it fairly close to the digital set top box), so the only gain would be picture quality (which is not very good, but acceptable, on my Epia).

[wtg]

The MVP puts much less strain on the server than watching a video on the server itself - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised how well it works.

The one exception is the CPU power necessary to generate the screens for the MVP. It does tag the CPU pretty heavily if only for just a second. Using a standard skin with the Next Recording panel ends up putting the hurt on a low-end CPU (or even mid-range w/ multiple MVPs) every 5 seconds, since the MVP server updates and resends the screen that often. If you disable the Next Recording panel for your MVP skin (you can have a separate skin for it) you probably won't even be able to tell its running on the PC, even while streaming a video.

Good luck,
Tim

P.S. I ended up disabling the Clock widget in my skin's main menu too, since that causes a redraw every 60 seconds. Running 3 MVP servers and having the 3 redraws kick off simultaneously, I could notice a hiccup on the server when I was using it for other tasks.

[sub]

It definitely requires a bit more grunt to generate screens to be displayed on the MVP rather than the PC. It effectively has to do everything that would normally happen on the PC, plus converting every pixel from RGB -> YUV, zipping up the screen, and sending it a across the network.

The video would play back fine, but I think it'd be quite frustrating on an M10000 to view the menus or OSD.

I've always advocated using the fastest server machine you can for use with an MVP.

[ddrawley]

I ran an MVP off a 1GHz PIII GBPVR. The menus on the MVP would hesitate, kind of sluggish. I have a P4 2.0 GHz now and it is quite snappy. I do not believe you will like the results with that CPU.

[PaulH]

For what it's worth I'm running GBPVR on my old PIII 850Mhz (768mb ram) with an 80gig primary HD and 150gig 2nd HD for the recordings.

Yes, the GBPVR menus are a bit sluggish both at the PC and the MVP, but it streams just fine to the MVP.

Granted, I don't do much else on the PC when recording or playing back.

-Paul

[stefan]

Thank's, guys. My computer would still be dedicated to gbpvr, doing nothing else. It's a bit too much money if the results aren't good enough. Maybe I'll wait until I have a better computer. I'd still like to have better image quality, though, but I don't have any room for graphics cards in my computer... anyone know of any good usb graphics cards?