On Sat, 2003-07-19 at 11:40, Ryan Oertel wrote: > Has anybody on this list installed WinTV or Freevo? Did it work well? > What hardware did you use? Which distribution? I've been using MythTV for a while. There are unofficial Debian packages available that I use. I'm pretty sure there are RPMs available for some other distributions. I'm currently using my desktop system (1.3GHz Athlon) for encoding video, and my laptop for playback. (MythTV's frontend program doesn't work with my Xinerama setup for some reason, though I recently noticed that the Sawfish window manager causes problems for certain programs, and it may affect MythTV) I use MPEG4 software encoding at the moment, since I can store a lot of video on my system that way, but it takes up a lot of CPU time and video gets choppy when I'm actually using the system. Because of this, I plan to look into getting a WinTV PVR-350 or another hardware encoding card, which would greatly reduce the CPU usage on my system. > I'm looking to set it up on a PC I've had laying around here for a > while. It's a Celeron 200MhZ w/ 32MB ram. I'm looking to see how well > it works before getting more ram and possibly a nice video card. One > which will compress/decompress w/o the CPU. I'm thinking of RedHat, > just because I'm familiar with it, but have thought about rolling my own > distribution with a custom kernel for performance. A slow machine like that will need full hardware encoding and decoding. I believe that MythTV supports the MPEG2 boards WinTV PVR-250 and PVR-350 for encoding, though I'm not sure if hardware decoding is supported on the -350. If the PVR-350 is supported both ways, that would probably be one of the best options for you. Otherwise, you'll need a faster processor for decoding -- similar to hardware you'd need for decoding DVDs in software. The hardware requirements would also be lessened if you have a video card that could do full or partial MPEG2 decoding (like many ATI cards). I did a tiny bit of digging, and it looks like http://ivtv.sourceforge.net/ might be a good place to look around for info.. -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ E pluribus unum / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20030719/cb99afa5/attachment.pgp