USB 2 tuner toys and older hardware?

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 08:48:38AM -0400, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> Another scenario - I have an older PC with USB 1.0 running Ubuntu 7.04. 
> What are people's experiences using such USB 2 tuner devices on older 
> hardware with USB 2.0 add-on cards?  Can the OS deal with the older system 
> and adequately process the audio and video, or is there a limiting 
> hardware factor (processor and memory) that necessitates a newer system?
> 
> I currently have mythtv, xawth, and tvtime installed, and am waiting for 
> the tuner to arrive sometime in a week or so.

Typically, the hardest tasks involved in DVR activity are
watching HD programs and encoding or transcoding video.

Encoding the video can be (and should be) taken care of by a
hardware encoder. Using a tuner without onboard hardware
encoding is asking for trouble.

Watching an HD program can be partially offloaded to the XVMC
feature found on NVidia and a few other video cards. 

You don't have to transcode video, but it will take up lots more
disk space.

My Myth box is an Athlon 3500+ with 1 GB, an NVidia 5200FX video
card, a Hauppauge PVR500 dual hardware encoder, and three disks.
I have no issues whatsoever with standard-def programming. I can
play HD programming, but there's no real point until I acquire
an HD TV sometime later this year.

-dsr-


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