Im planning to put 3 wintv nova-t tuners in this box.
Is this going to overstretch a socket 478 pentium 4 @ 1.7ghz ?

Declan

It looks like this tuner is a digital ATSC tuner and does not do any software-based encoding of the incoming signal, so CPU utilization should be quite modest for recording. There 2 things to watch out for are:

1. Playback of hidef is quite intensive. If this box is also being used for your frontend, I doubt it has sufficient processing power to playback anything that is hidef.

2. 3 concurrent recordings of hief shows is ~60mbps. This is faily modest for a modern EIDE or SATA drive, but given the real-time requriements for recording, I would not be running other jobs like transcoding or commercial flagging on that machine.

Marc

its not hidef, so maybe ill be ok, i hope

Hummm... I thought that most digital ATSC transmissions were hidef. Your display may be std-def, but I suspect that most of your recordings will be at hi-def resolutions.

Marc

Dont know exactly about the internals of this tuner, but I already have a 18month old mythtv box using 2 of these with a athlon 1.4ghz processor.

Its coping ok at the moment and the recordings are 1-1.5gb per hour, so that sounds like SD to me surely?


for the new build im hoping to move to three tuners in the combined front/backend on a pentium 4 1.7 (big emphasis on getting it as silent as possible) and possibly rebuild the old box as a frontend for another room in the house later (provided i can get suitable network bandwidth - possibly homeplug). the plan is to get the new build working 100% before de-commissioning the old one.

I use a VIA EPIA 1Ghz CPU with a Hauppauge 150 and a 500 (= 3 tuners total).
Recording is not a problem, since it only takes about 15% of CPU when all three are recording.
Playback is at its limits (95%) when recording on 3 tuners at the same time, since XvMC is not working on my EPIA in R5E50, but there still is no stuttering in playback.

So, you should be fine as long as it is not HD.

was the haupauge 500 difficult to get working, i was tempted to get one and try for 4 tuners , but i think i read somewhere that it required a kernel patch ?

D