Realistic Expectations

gilgamesh · 2007-02-12, 07:47 PM

Hello,

I am looking for advice on a system I have laying around that I would like to use as a PVR. I have an old Dell Dimension Pentium III collecting dust that I would like to upgrade to use solely as a PVR. It only has an onboard video card and 128MB RAM so this would have to be upgraded correct?

Since it is only a PCI board what video card(s) are recommended? Do I need a video card to encode and decode or will one card suffice? I would like to hook this up to a 40" LCD via component or HDMI/DVI if at all possible - do they even make a vanilla PCI card that will handle this?

I plan on bulking the memory up to 512 (it's max), will this be sufficient?

Also, while my knowledge of gbpvr is very limited, does it have the same type of network back end/front end capablities of MythTV? Where can I find more info on this?

Any and all info would be appreciated.

Thanks.

***sub*** · 2007-02-12, 07:50 PM

What speed is the CPU? The recommended minimum I recommend is a 1GHz PIII class CPU.

gilgamesh · 2007-02-12, 07:59 PM

sub Wrote:What speed is the CPU? The recommended minimum I recommend is a 1GHz PIII class CPU.

No it is only 667MHz. I take it I will have problems?

***sub*** · 2007-02-12, 08:04 PM

It'll probably run, but it'll be very sluggish.

I also recommend 512MB of memory.

gilgamesh · 2007-02-12, 08:11 PM

Will a good video card help by offloading cpu tasks? What type of video card do you recommend?

Is it worth my time to put effort into this box or buy something newer?

***sub*** · 2007-02-12, 08:18 PM

gilgamesh Wrote:Will a good video card help by offloading cpu tasks?

GDI+ that is used for generating all screens, and OSD graphics shown on the video, is very CPU hungry, which is a large factor in my minimum CPU recommendations, and wouldnt be helped by a video card.

Quote:What type of video card do you recommend?

Most people use a modern ATI or nvidia video card. I dont know what models are available that are PCI only.

Quote:Is it worth my time to put effort into this box or buy something newer?

This is up to you really. Some people are prepared to put up with slow machine. Personally it'd drive me nuts.

gilgamesh · 2007-02-12, 08:37 PM

sub Wrote:This is up to you really. Some people are prepared to put up with slow machine. Personally it'd drive me nuts.

Me too, back to the drawing board on this one ... Thanks for your time.

blizard · 2007-02-13, 01:20 AM

In general what you want to do is to use a rather new LCD (40'') connect it with HDMI (new type of connection) and build this from old hardware. That would cause problem as hardware change very fast and old hardware parts can become more expensive then to build a new system from scratch with today's hardware.

Don't forget Gilgamesh, that it will also depend on what kind of tv-tuner card you want to use and what kind of file that are produced as end result. MPEG2 which is common for analogue tuner and some digital tuner will take very much space on your hard disk, so you would want the power to transcode from MPEG2 to Xvid or H.264 (or whatever format that fit your need). One recording that will take 3 GB to store can be compressed to something around 1.5 or even 800 GB if you use any of these codec and don't expect to much of a high resolution on the screen.

If you look at the latest video card from ATI, then you should know that ATI have divided their video card to manage up to some level of HD resolution. The lower level up to X1600 (medium level vidoe card: X1100 up X1950 is the ordering ASFAIK) is not supposed to manage high resolution (HD) from the bottom to the top of their high end video card, so it could be smart to research which kind of HD you want and to get the video card that can support it. (I use ATIs video card, so I know a bit more about them then today's Nviudia, but they will also have different level of support for output of HD resolution on TV depending on what video card you use.)

With a large screen at 40'' you have to have a newer video card that can support that resolution.

Depending on how you plan to use your PVR (transcoding and other task like streaming or connecting portable mediaplayer), you could find rather cheap CPU to do the job or something more expensive. I would advice you to get any dual core CPU as those would make it possible to run task in the background without any large problem and still use GBPVR to watch a movie. Transcoding as a process are rather CPU demanding even for today's HD resolution as files (in H.264) and will make full use of a rather high end CPU. Ask around here and I am sure you will have some idea about how much power you need to transcode or rip material. It can take considerable time with a slow CPU and even on a new system it will not be that fast going from MPEG2 to H.264 or Xvid.

You would also have use of looking at http://www.silentPCreview.com as that site many good advice on how to build a silent PC and what to look for in the process.

gilgamesh · 2007-02-13, 08:17 PM

I think HD is out of the question for this box. Would it suffice for SD?

SickBoy · 2007-02-13, 10:15 PM

I'm in the "glass half full" camp here.

If you're just wanting to experiment, particularly with SD TV and not HD, go ahead and pick up a nice tuner card and throw it in. If you have eventual plans to get a better setup (and are just using a box you already have and don't otherwise use), the tuner cards are plenty portable to new machines.

My initial setup was a PVR500 in a HP Pavilion machine with a 800 MHz CPU/512 MB RAM, and it worked great for the (relatively) simple things I did. No HD, no transcoding, just recording and watching TV and outputting to a SD TV via composite output.

If you're just wanting to do some experimenting, it can't hurt anything. You'll see what it can and can't do and that will help guide your future hardware purchases. Just be prepared to start from the ground up (more or less) when you're ready for a "real" system.