i have a desktop with 350 mhz, i would like to use it and record tv and watch tv off it. i will be using a pvr-x50. will i be able to or is this to much demand on it?

This is prbably the most convenient reference - http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=CPUs

A number of people have managed to squeeze far more out of low spec machines like this than I would have believed possible (e.g - mjl, aovermy), but it takes a certain bloody mindedness to pull it off. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to try.

I had an 800Mhz Athlon with 512 RAM that I had a PVR350 and a PVR500 in. It worked great for standard def playback while recording three things at once (best I remember, CPU would be at around 70 percent during this). I had a RAM chip go out with took me down to 256 and noticed a LOT of choppyness in playtback, RAM is important. I'd say go for the 450, give it some RAM (512 Min) use a PVR 350 for playback and it'd work.

I have an xbox frontend using the original xbox. It's a 733 Mhz with 64Meg RAM. It works pretty well as a FE only box, thie interface isn't as snappy as my Dragon Class box but hey, whaddaya expect?

You'll need to do a bit of tuning to make your 450 Mhz experience useable tho..

Advise:

Dont use EXT3 as the filesystem for /myth, use XFS or JFS
Set your Program Guide to ECO
Use the lightest skin you can find, I think the "default" theme is one of the smallest.
record in a lower bitrate and resolution
turn off VBI
maks sure your hard drive is tuned to the max with hdparm
Set all mythjobqueue jobs to be run late at night including commercial flagging.

The Ether..

You can run KnoppMyth R5C7 quite well on a Pentium III 550 MHz machine w/256 MB RAM and a PVR-350. As closed captioning is a requirement in my household, I have enabled VBI without any ill effect. Given the 350's MPEG decoder, I also don't worry about commercial flagging jobs. There's typically plenty of CPU left over even when recording and playing at the same time.

On the other hand, I attempted an upgrade to R5E50 this past Saturday but had trouble with VBI (ran out of time to diagnose) and found the MythTV UI to be horribly slow. I could watch windows being painted on-screen; I assume this has something to do with the XF86 -> X.org upgrade and/or ivtvdev. (It also seemed like two channels were more "snowy" than with the older ivtv drivers in R5C7, but that's subjective.)

About the only thing I'd change in this system is to upgrade the RAM. It's not the latest and greatest but it is awfully close to perfect as a basic DVR.

I've been running my backend on a 333mHz system for the last year. I can say that it works, but there are some severe limitations. I wouldn't attempt to watch shows directly on it, don't try to record and playback at the same time, and don't try to comm flag or edit programs. MythWeb will work, but it will be very slow to respond. All these reasons are why I plan on retiring the 333 for a P4 system I had donated by a friend.

_________________
Backend R5E50
P4 1.3 - 384MB, 250GB HD, HD5000AV, PVR150 non MCE
Frontend R5E50
EPIA M1000 - 512MB, 40GB HD, Streamzap
KnoppMyth Folding Team Stats

Slightly off topic, but what's VBI?

Back on topic.
A friend of mine jus' upgraded his daughters computer, so now he has a 600Mhz machine free. Not sure of the other specs yet. Would y'all recommend a PVR-350, or a PVR-150 and a decent video card? Not sure how much videos vs recordings he'll be watching.

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KM R5E50; K8NGM2; A64-3800+; 1024MB PC3200; LG DVD-RW; Seagate 750GB; 6600 PCI-E; Onboard sound; Hauppauge PVR-150

VBI stands for Vertical Blanking Interval. Simply put, this part of the video signal doesn't display on-screen. In the US this "unused" part of the signal contains closed caption information.



It will work fine for recordings with at least 256 MB of RAM and a PVR-350 set up for TV out. It would be okay for most videos if you avoided commercial flagging or other CPU-intensive jobs.

I've tried the PVR-150 and video card route but ran into all sorts of issues. In particular I had trouble with skipping forward and back while watching recordings. Less significantly, I also found that the PVR-350 had a lot better color saturation than the nVidia-based card I had picked up.

PVR-350 433mhz 256meg FE and BE works great

The key for running a slow CPU (I hear rumors of even slower CPU's) here is that you need a capture card with hardware encoding _and_ decoding. Of course slow CPU's are not high def capable.

I acquired a small footprint PC from a trashout at work and put R5C7 on it. The current release at the time (R5D1) had unsolved issues with the 350 and I got tired of fighting them. It has one slot, but that is all I needed since network, sound, and vga (unused vga since I use the 350 for output) are on the MB.

If you have motherboard vga with shared memory you may want to reduce the shared memory to the minimum to give as much of that 256 meg as possible to the system.

Stock record (480x480) and playback screen (720x480) settings.

It works great:
- Live TV
- watch prerecorded while recording another

You haven't lived till you have put a front end on your laptop and watched TV in bed via Wifi (80211g at the minimum). I am running Ubuntu Edgy with a stock build of MythTV 0.19 that I had to build because Edgy comes with 0.20.

I may have seen some dropped frames when it served a remote front end while doing live TV.

I am currently running PIII 650 backend with a PVR-500 tuner in it. The machine was from my work that was going to be desposed. I was able to record two programs at once and watch a show on it. This was only if I recorded in 480x480. I have since moved to recording in 720x480 (I had recording quality issues with the lower setting) and have not been able to watch programs on the backend.

I am going to be retiring the machine hopefully this week. I got lucky over the Christmas holiday and will be replacing it with a Dual Opteron system.

Well, since that post I've re-upgraded to R5E50. I suffered with the VBI and MythTV UI problems for a couple of weeks until I could resolve them. The magic bullet for both was an update to ivtv-0.10.

This new version of ivtv is such a significant improvement that I hope it's integrated into KnoppMyth soon. The out-of-the-box advantage is that I'm finally able to view closed captions on the TV Out of my PVR-350.