Minimum System Requirements

[WerewolfTA]

Hello all,

I'm in the early stages of planning to build a dedicated PVR after I upgrade my main computer later this year (hopefully). I've researched several of the diy pvr solutions and really like the looks of gbpvr. When I first found this site, I thought that I saw system requirements listed somewhere (a P-III 733 comes to mind), but now I can't find them. Are the minimum/recommended system specs listed somewhere? Thanks.

[nitrogen_widget]

I just upgraded to one of those socket LGA 775 celeron D's at 2.66ghz & it moves pretty good. In fact, it will sometimes beat out my 1.8 ghz Athlon 64 when converting files to Xvid. Not bad when you consider the cheaper price (About $90 online). I'm not sure though if the DDR2 could also be a speed factor.
It will allow me to make a recording & stream an xvid file to an mvp using the Hauppauge client & as long as I set the processes like comclean & comskip to be lower than the MVP client it doesn't stutter. Much.

A better CPU would of been nice, but I really think investing in a bigger HD & keeping any recordings I'll want to watch on the MVP in mpeg2 format is the way to go right now.

[WerewolfTA]

Intel PIII 900MHz, 256KB L2 and 512MB of PC133 SDRAM FSB 133MHz - average

Excellent! I was hoping 900MHz would be usable (my current system which I'm planning to convert to the PVR is an Athlon Thunderbird 900 w/ 256MB PC100, planning to add an additional 256-512MB RAM). I figured I'd start modestly with 1 tuner, the PVR 150. Then, once the WAF was sufficiently high, I could start adding, which would of course necessitate an upgrade at some point. By then, she should be hooked and I can push that through with little resistance. Bwa ha ha.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Rednax]

1. Intel PIII 500MHz, 512KB L2 and 768MB PC100 of SDRAM FSB 100MHz - fair
   
2. Intel PIII 900MHz, 256KB L2 and 512MB of PC133 SDRAM FSB 133MHz - average
   
3. Intel PIV 2.4GHz, 1MB L2 and 1GB of PC2100 DDRAM FSB 533MHz Dual Channel - Good
   
4. AMD Sempron 64-bit 2600+, 128KB L2 and 1GB PC2700 DDRAM FSB 800MHz Dual Channel - Better
   

Does this mean an AMD K6-2+ 550MHz* (my current set-up) has no chance? *I may well overclock this.

[nemulate]

I doubt the cpu would be able to handle live tv with o.s.d. etc but I'm prepared to be corrected as always!

[Rednax]

I doubt the cpu would be able to handle live tv with o.s.d. etc

I don't need live TV via the PC - I'll be using a TV as a monitor & can always switch that to watch TV direct.

I just want to record TV & playback the recorded files.

If I can use huffyUV for compression/decompression then that would help as it runs OK on similar spec system
http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu...ffyuv.html

[nemulate]

Well difficult for me to say as my spec is quite different, spose the only way to tell is try it. If you hang around for a while no doubt the author of the software, Sub will be around and he can advise you better! Think he lives in NZ so probably in bed at the mo!

[Rednax]

I only have Win98SE, so can't try GB-PVR yet. Intially plane to use:
VirtualVCR for recording http://virtualvcr.sourceforge.net/
VVCRS2 to schedule it http://vvcrs.asktech.ca/vvcrs2.php
TVGuide for schedule info (unfortunately I can't use this to drive VVCRS automatically).

When I get WinXP I'll give GB-PVR a go (& report results here).

[nitrogen_widget]

I was running GBPVR on a slot A athlon 750.
The menus were sluggish though this could of been the graphic card also.
For recording & play back seperatly it worked fairly well.
It would take a while to cut the commercials out of a file but it did it.

The big problem I had was back to back recordings on different channels.
With comskip running during recordings the cpu was tanked & the channel change signals sent to the directv via serial cable would come too slowly.
So a lot of times the first number would be forgotton & the channel would swith to whatever the last 2 number's were.

After my upgrade to the celeron D no problems though now i'm starting to wish I had spent the extra for a P4.

One other thing. 512mb ram is the minimum IMO.
Some of the more graphical skins seem to really suck up the ram.

[ttmickelson]

1. What's the minimum requirements for playback of HD content?

My laptop can do 720p playback, but it can't handle transport streams from a 1080i channel. It a PM 1.6GHz, 1GB w/no pagefile, ATI R300SE, wired LAN.

2. How many concurrent SDTV/HDTV recordings can occur before frames are skipped/lost on:
a. a dedicated, local, non-RAID disk?
b. a dedicated, local, 2 disk RAID0 array?
c. a 100Mb NAS?

My math says 1 SD show is ~500KB/s, 1 HD show is ~2MB/s, LAN is 10MB/s best case, and a disk should do at least 30MB/s. If I estimated 50% context switching, you'd think all three scenarios could handle 2 each of SD/HD simultaneous recording.
Has anyone hit the bandwidth limit of their PVR topology?