Hello again folks,

I'm currently using the following;
P3 - 733
512 Megs Ram
Pinnacle PCTV Pro
ATI TV Wounder

However the 733 seems to be a little lacking for MythTV. I find myself having scaled the capture resolution to 320x400, and the loss of quality is not my first choice.

I see myself faced with four options;
1.
Replace the 733 with an 800 Mhz P3 and over clock that 800 Mhz P3 to 866 mhz
- This will help somewhat, but will it really be enough?

2.
Replace the 733 with a 1.2 Ghz Celeron (I think / hope the motherboard will accept it)
- The 1.2 ghz will be enough for viewing at around 400x480, but probably not the "highest" quality setting
- Will I be able to do PIP with this?

3.
Purchase a PVR 250 - offload the work from the CPU to an MPG daughter card seems like it will do it?
- Will I get the super high quality I see?
- Will using the PVR 250 with the Pinnicle (for PIP) work well?

4.
Purchase a new motherboard and AMD 2000+ or better.
- I'd perfer to avoid this. With the costs of MB, Processor and Ram... damn lots for my PVR..

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike

3 is your best option.
I'm very happy with the quality of my 250 and TV out from my 440.
While this will work for PiP, having the bttv tuner is going to cripple you system.
Remember while watching live tv, the stream is being encoded then decoded a few
seconds later. That is why your 733 cannot cut it...

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

in addition you will have to decode another stream for pip so the processor deffinately won't cut it. On top of that for your processor to be able to handle the decode of the pvr250 mpeg2 files you will most likely need to use xvmc with also kills the pip function, at least if you have one hardware and one software card. I'm not sure about two hardware cards as I don't have that setup.

Thanks for the advise guys.

I've just done a little shopping around;
Seems a PVR 250 runs for $180 - $210 CDN, and a PVR 350 runs for $230 - $255 CDN.

Seems the better value is the PVR 350 as it can encode and decode. Is the current IvTV up for the challenge? Will I truely be able to use the more advanced features of the PVR 350 ?

Will I truely being offloading nearly all the video processing responsibility to the PVR card?

Thanks again,
mike