I may have miscommunicated my intent for the slow computer. I just want to see how it works, flaws, bugs, etc. Once I can see that it will work for what I want, it will be easier to get funding approval from the wife. The costs for Tivo haven't dropped in the last year and the monthly subscription really turns us off. If I can do something flexible with inexpensive hardware and open source software, we'd be very happy. For now, I was going to use my main computer for recording, compression and storage of the video, and playback on the 'slow' one. One side question: how easily does the setup work with DirecTV? Can the computer remote-control the DTV receiver? How easy is the user interface for watching/pausing/recording TV? -Ryan On Sat, 2003-07-19 at 13:16, Mike Hicks wrote: > 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.. -- Ryan Oertel <Ryan at IntegraOnline.Com> -------------- 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/db3647eb/attachment.pgp