I am intrested in the minimum RAM requirement, because I have access to a 300 Mhz Machine with 48MB of RAM (max capacity 64). My search of the postings did not turn up the answer, however, my search may not have been exhaustive.

If this is not enough, then I would like to be able to communicate to my fellow coworkers to be on the lookout for a machine that is to be discarded \ decommisioned with ??? capacity ofRAM.

I do not need this machine to play back video: I was thinking of using it only to record programs and have it serve up shows to other machines through the network.

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R7.3: 0.22.20091023-1, Hauppauge PVR-500 (Philips FQ1236A MK4), Gigabyte Gigabyte EG45M-UD2H, E5200 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GEFORCE 256MB

The numbers I recall seeing were a bit higher. I have a 2001 "vintage" PC with 64mb that ran Windows ME that I tried to do my first install on. I could only bring up the penguin screen, so maybe I did manage to get the backend installed. The install process complained about my BIOS being too old, so maybe it wouldn't work anyways.

That computer however IS strong enough to run freeNAS. So when you run out of disk space you can slap a large drive in it and mount it as another directory.

Let us know how things turn out.

I recommend 512Mb for SDTV, and would recommend against anything below 256Mb. It might "work" but you won't be happy with it.

For HDTV 1Gb is recommended, and 512Mb is minimal.

Thanks TJC. I have come to realize that when I get a response from you, it is one that will answer my question

If the sole purpose of the box (will not be used for playback) is to record SD TV with a Hauppauge 500, would the RAM requirement go below 384 MB? My prototype rig runs with 384MB and records dual channels well. I guess it would need to be able to run the myth webserver, because that's how I would issue record commands.

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R7.3: 0.22.20091023-1, Hauppauge PVR-500 (Philips FQ1236A MK4), Gigabyte Gigabyte EG45M-UD2H, E5200 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GEFORCE 256MB

256Mb is the low end of the recommend range but it should be alright. The warning was that anything less than that wasn't going to work very well. My SDTV production box consistently uses about 60% of the 512Mb installed seriously, and the rest is buffer or cache. With 256Mb I suspect there would be some swapping, although nothing prohibitive.

I think you also need to be careful of using an old box as the IDE standard might be just as old. You will need to ensure the box is using ATA100 as teh drive throughput will be bottlenecked otherwise.

Just a thought.

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Girkers

Hi,

All good stuff posted. You would love that box running DSL "DamnSmallLinux" (50 meg foot print) and would probably be a good tool for you also.

I tend to use "older" hardware and found that 384 meg is lowest limit to use altho 256 will run. I use 384 ~ 512 meg swap and that gives me very good stablity on R5C7. With 256 mem, the frontend would sometimes just exit. I suspect it was do to taking to much time with swapping.

I have not dropped back to 256 to "evaluate" it in R5F1 and probably won't either.

Mike