Minimum hardware req

[Tom]

Hi all,

after setting up GBPVR on my home PC (3.2 GHz Intel, Hauppauge 150 MCE), I'm thinking about building a 'pvr-server' from an old computer but am uncertain about the minimum hardware requirements for it. I have an old Pentium III machine available and would add the Hauppauge MCE-150 card and a larger harddrive to it. The MB might be upgradeable to a PIII 800 or maybe 1 GHZ processor.

The system should just be controlled via the network and store the recorded files so I can access them from either my home office PC or media adapter attached to my TV, so the only job for this machine would be to record and serve the video files.

Does anyone have experience with such a low level system and gbpvr?

Tom

[sub]

I wouldnt go below 1GHz, which I've told people in the past is the minimum.

[Bathman]

My system specs are pretty lowly and I can get GBPVR to run without any problems.

[sub]

Its still going to run below 1GHz, but below this I found the menus etc to be too sluggish.

[Tom]

Thanks guys for the quick reply. I'll see if I can upgrade it to 1 GHz...

Tom

[spyder40]

I'm running an old Intel 800 with 512mb ram pushing 2 MVP units and it works great. I can have one doing live tv and the other pushing a recording with no hiccups at all. As to the menu sluggishness it's not bad and I thought that's just how it is. The software that came with the MVP performed the same speed wise, but sure didn't have any features

[Darx-starz]

Ahhh, but if you have a nice fast cpu the menu's are very snappy

[Guest]

I am interested in minimum hardware requirements, as I am a newbie to PVR. I hve just bought a PVR350, installed into a spare work Pentium 4 PC (256Mb RAM) running GB-PVR, and it works just fine.

So, I am looking to push this into a dedicated box. Thinking along the lines of a VIA M10000 mobo with 512 Mb RAM, 250Gb HDD.

Does that sound about right? I read that less than 1GhZ makes the GBPVR menus sluggish. This box will be dedicated to PVR/ MP3 etc. I only want TVOUT, no PC monitor, and pref no keyboard or mouse (running GBPVR through Hauppauge remote)

Looking for best bang per buck, quiet machine in TV rack, always on, stable etc.

Cheers
Andy

[PVR4ME]

I was able to get gbpvr working on a Thinkpad 600X P3 450MHz machine with 320 MB ram and W2k serving an MVP and using a Hauppauge USB2 pvr. Indeed the menu system is a bit slow, but this is ok considering the price of the laptop and the benefits of using a dedicated, quiet machine as a full time server.

For the longest time, all I could get was choppy video and was pretty close to installing a newer laptop to do the job. After reading many posts on the subject and performing alterations (i.e. quartz.dll b swap, registry changes, etc.) without success I finally came upon the fact that my pcmcia 10/100 lan card was apparently not offloading the CPU as it should. I know sub suggests registry changes that is suppose to make this happen, but I believe (and he may have stated) that the LAN hardware must be able to support this. I noticed that even after the registry changes, CPU percent usage shown in task manager would readily go to 100% just doing normal network file transfers. After swapping to another card, in this case a motorola wireless G card, CPU percentage usage dropped to an average of 25% utilization during file transfers. Apparently, this card did allow offloading of the CPU and freed-up enough to allow the system to achieve the throughput required for running an MVP with gbpvr.

It would be interesting to know the bare minimum system required to run an MVP without choppy video (I would be more concerned with this than the slow menu system). I have a PII 266 MHz laptop w/ 96MB ram I should try to use and I'll post the results when I have them.

[dpettipas]

I've got an oldcomputer with amd 1 ghz with 512 ram & a plextor m402u
Does any one know if this will work with gbpvr