Conventional wisdom around here as far as I can gather is that a 3GHz system is required to play back HD. I assume things get more complicated with dual core processors. Does anyone know if a dual core Pentium-D 2.8 GHz be able to play back 1080i?

I know not of conventional wisdom, but I can speak of my own personal experience-

My main backend is connected to a 27" HDTV/monitor, has a GF4 Ti4200 (128mb) video card, an AMD Athlon XP cpu running around 2Ghz and 2gb of DDR memory:

no problems with HD playback at all.

It may be that the hardware tweaks (overclocking, memory running somewhat faster than spec, etc.) may be responsible for this.
I don't know.

My first break into HD is a KWorld USB ATSC tuner, I havn't tried it on my myth box yet (monitor issues) but on an older Windows box - Athlon XP 2800+ (which is really clocked at 2.08GHz) and 1GB RAM, except for the RAM, it sounds similar to rogerdugans.

Watching the tuner in Windows is almost acceptable, but there are periodic stutters. if I were recording without watching, I'm sure the recording would be OK. That is, I think it the decoding that's overtaxing the PC. Also, it may be personal prejudice , but I gotta think a Linux-based OS like KM would handle it better, so I'm not REALLY contradicting rogerdugans, I'm just trying to say this CPU is pushing the lower limit of what is possible.

Moving into the speculative realm, I say if a 2.08GHz core is borderline, a 2.8GHz core would probably be just fine; even given that comparing clockrates between Intel and AMD lines is not a great idea. And since you're talking Dual cores, that adds even more headroom to the equation.

I can play HD just fine with my P4 3GHz HT. It stumbles pretty bad when commflagging but I just us the pause_commflagging script to solve that. I would think with a 2.8GHz dual core you should be ok.

Britney

i started with FE/BE combo that had a single core p4 2.8GHz. HD playback worked... if nothing else needed power at the same time. commflag, etc. would stop the video in its tracks. not too big of a deal, but the OSD would kill it too. i would say that it'll work fine, but you may encounter some frustrations if it is your primary front end. good luck!

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#R5.5#
ATSC OTA on FE/BE - EPoX EP-8KDA7I, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 512MB RAM, GeForce FX5200, Kworld ATSC-110x2
FE - Antec NSK2400, ABIT NF-M2 (w/GeForce 6150), Athlon 64 3800+, 1 GB RAM

I am using a Pentium-D 3GHZ for my box. I ran top while playing a 1080i recording that is being deinterlaced with bob2x and here is what I see:

1. The process with the top CPU utilization is "mythfrontend", which peaks at 70% utilization and typically runs at 60% utilization.

2. The system runss at 50% - 60% idle.

I suspect you will be fine at 2.8ghz dual-core. Also, I used to run a 2.8GHZ HT system for hidef without problems.

Marc

2.8G dual? Plenty fast enough.

My Athlon XP 2400 will almost do HD without hardware video assist. With it (cheap FX5200 card), CPU is about 50% utilised.

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| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club