How do I eke out every last possible ounce of performance from low-end hardware? I have an AMD K6/2-500 front-end machine with a recently upgraded ATI radeon pci card. It is a cool surplus set-top box made by a company called stellar one, that a local electronics store was selling for $100 a pop a while back. It originally came with an MPEG card that is not supported by linux (something like IGS or cyber pro). It's in a relatively small case, has a laptop HD inside, and is nice and quiet. It has an IR keyboard and mouse that I got working after some hacking. While not the latest hardware, I like it and want to get some use out of it.

It can't quite playback full-quality video. I've done some recording set to lower quality like 320x320, and it seems to handle playback of that okay. Would I stand a chance at full-quality playback if I were to rebuild from scratch with optimization, or use a distro like gentoo which is supposed to squeeze the most performance out of your hardware? I may be setting a record for the lowest-end box here.

well I'm not sure that another distro is going to make that much difference. you said you took out an mpeg card, does that mean you have a free pci slot? also are your recordings mpeg2 or rtjpeg or mpeg4? mpeg2 takes the most processor to decode without a hardware accelerator, but is the most common one to have hardware acceleration. mpeg4 should be the easiest on the system to decode.

if you do have a pci slot and are recording mpeg2 you might could get one of the dxr2/3 boards. they are pretty old now and are well supported in linux.

I'll check into those boards. Where would I find them, ebay? Have you heard of the IGS cyber pro?

I have two PCI slots on the motherboard, but special risers are required to use them due to the case geometry, and only one right-hand riser is provided, and I'm using that for the radeon 7000. I could possibly find a left-hand riser or a flex-cable riser to use the other slot. Another thing I have thought of is to put a PVR-350 in instead of the current radeon 7000. But I'd have to buy another TV for that instead of the current LCD display I'm using for this frontend system, and I'd have to do more hacking to get the console also working on TV-out, not to mention that it would be more money!

I'm currently using the MPEG-2 codec on my backend where I have a PVR-350. I haven't gotten into 'transcoding' yet but I guess that's one approach, to re-encode in a different format that would be easier for the low-end frontend box?

Here is some trivia on the box in question, which is called the 'stellar one connect TV'. I endend up buying three of them for $100 each.

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stor ... tory3.html

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stor ... tory7.html

http://www.vetcosurplus.com/settoppcfaq.htm

well actually a quick goole search finds that the cyberpro has a linux driver. the one I saw referenced a .o file which would be a precompiled which would pose a problem, but a better search just might come up with a driver for that card you took out.

what I saw real quick was this site. But I have to get back to the game so I can't look anymore.

http://www.gctglobal.com/Download/Taichi/Tuner_Program/tuner_program.html