[Gllug] Myth TV setup

[John Winters]

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 16:43 +0000, Ben Fitzgerald wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 02:52:10PM +0000, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> > 
> > On 13/1/2006, "Ben Fitzgerald" <ben_m_f at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > 
> > >Can anyone recommend combinations of CPU + graphics board that will play
> > >back without problems. I have a 733PIII plus a graphics card with tv-out
> > >(haven't got the name to hand right now) and that is okay with some
> > >things but struggles with action scenes.
> > 
> > Hardware MPEG decoder.  Something like the DXR-3, which is well supported.
> 
> Simon!!! I almost put in a note asking for you not to suggest this! ;-)
> 
> I know this is one option, as we have discussed before, which I thank
> you for. I am curious to know what others think about the minimum cpu +
> graphics card (with tv out) required.

Are you sure it's your playback machine?  I use a wide variety of boxes
in one way or another and most things can manage it.  Some data points.

800 MHz Mini-ITX EPIA 800	Not a hope.  Can't show anything at all.

600 MHz Mini-ITX with hardware MPEG	Almost.  Some channels play.
					Some stutter.

700 MHz Celeron with separate video card.  I don't recall exactly what
the video card is but it's several years old and nothing special then.
It has 3D acceleration but not enough oomph to need a fan, or even much
in the way of a heatsink.  This is my boys' machine and it does playback
fine.

Then I use several other machines varying from 1.8 GHz up to an Athlon
64 3400.  All of these work fine, but *all* of them show occasional
artifacts when there's a lot of fast movement.  My belief is that this
is not caused by the speed of the playback machine but by the bandwidth
limitations of the DVB-T medium.  When you study the channels, it's
quite clear that some of them are allocated more bandwidth than others
(resulting in a crisper picture) but sometimes it just isn't enough and
something in the picture lags behind, regardless of which machine you
play it on.

John

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