I'm keen to set up a system based around a PVR-250, but would prefer to use as much of my existing old hardware to do so. My main machine would be more than adequate for everything, but I don't want to use that as a MythTV server in case I want to boot into Windows to do some gaming while a show might be recording.

Question is, would an old dual P-3 450 (with 192MB RAM if I recall) be adequate for backend-only, when paired with a PVR-250 and Fast Ethernet? Granted, I think this old system is buggy since the CPUs always seem to be at 20-30% load when IDLE on Win2000, but even then, would this be adequate for serving files to a frontend on a different box?

I'm also keen to try to use a Sony Vaio laptop as my frontend. I'm a little hesitant about it since it's only a P-3 800 with 128MB, and the mouse cursor was corrupted when I tried running the latest version of Knoppix a couple months ago. I'm also not sure if the TV-out from the NeoMagic chipset and the DVD-ROM drive will work as desired. I don't have the exact model number at the moment.

Question is, does this sound workable, or would I be making too many sacrifices on the hardware? Hard drive space is not an issue at least. Any suggestions?

On an unrelated note, I'm absolutely lusting after that new Mac Mini as a PVR device with Myth. Mmmm...

-Packgrog

http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO ... ure_device

says "A Celeron 450 uses 2% CPU for encoding a 480x480 16Mbps MPEG-2 stream" when using an MPEG2 encoder card like the PVR-250. So yes, for record only, it should work, I guess.

Then, once you get that going, you can use KnoppMyth's ability to startup as a remote frontend from CD and check if the Vaio is capable of working like that.

I'm a Mac guy from way back so the Mac mini looks quite nice; there is a remote frontend version of MythTV for it, too.

The big question is, could a setup like this effectively stream one recording while recording off of TV? Also, would this setup be adequate for streaming live TV to a remote client? I suspect that the IDE speed would have significant impact on this, and since the onboard IDE only runs at 33 (rather than the 100+ of more modern controllers), I'm a little concerned.

Another related factor I'm curious about is if the system IS getting overloaded, does recording take priority, or would both recording and streaming wind up with equal frame drops? I suppose this could even be a valid question for non-ghetto systems. Heh.

An mpeg stream from pvr250 only takes about 2.5 Mbps so a 33MBps ide should be more than sufficient.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Me too. I wonder how the TV out (composite/Svideo) adaptor works? If I got a DVI-I double-adaptor, could I drive an XGA projector as well as a TV? (probably not)

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

I'm running a system that is only slightly better than the one you described:

P3 500 Mhz.
256 MB RAM
PVR-350 (using video out.)

I have both the front end and the back end running on it. I've done a test where I recorded one program on the back end, watched a second program on the front end and watched a third program on another computer (using samba on the myth box.) I saw no problems while doing this test. I do have a couple standing problems that I havn't worked out yet.

If I have commercial flagging turned on, the back end fails to start up when I reboot. Possibly, it crashes at random times. I'm not sure what caused this, but it hasn't happened since I turned commercial flagging off.

Live TV usally freezes after a few seconds and I have to exit out to do anything. I can work around this by going to live TV, switch to my channel, hit record, exit and watch the recording from the playback list. I think there is a fix for this, but I havn't got around to it.

Playback will sometimes freeze up the front end when it skips around the recording. Nothing can be done for a couple minutes until it comes out of it. This happens maybe once in 5 hours of viewing. I havn't yet looked at the logs or even top for signs of the cause. I don't know much about Linux, but this sure acts a lot like virtual memory resizing on windows. Eventually I'll throw some extra memory in there and see if it goes away.

It takes a long time to load pages from MythWeb, especially while recording or playing videos.

It took a long time (I'm still working on it) to get all the bugs worked out of the Hauppauge card. Not that it doesn't work, it just takes some research (mostly on this forum) to get through all the issues.

Most of these problems are with the front end so I don't thing you'll have much trouble.