[TriLUG] mythtv ramblings and a questions about december mythtvpresentation

[John Turner]

On Mar 22, 2005, at 2:45 PM, Tanner Lovelace wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 14:31:27 -0500, John Turner <jdturner at nc.rr.com> 
> wrote:
>> One note from my research into HD-MythTV. The backend recorder can be
>> slow as it doesn't do anything but read/write to disks. The frontend
>> Myth box has to be BIG (I was reading Intel P4 2.5G+) because it has 
>> to
>> do HDTV decoding in software.  I have not tried any of this yet, but 
>> if
>> you want to do HDTV it seems to require a very fast frontend machine.
>
> Assuming the encoding is done in hardware, or, if I recall correctly, 
> the
> signal is already in mpeg/mpeg2 format, then yes, you're correct.  If
> you're not doing HDTV, though, and just doing normal stuff, perhaps
> with software encoding, then you do need a beefy backend.  It all
> depends on where you want your major computations to be.
>
>

True. But I was only talking about HDTV recording. But the same can be 
said for any of the hardware encoding cards (PVR-250, 500, etc).  That 
said most modern machines can decode MPEG2 streams, but HD streams 
involve much more processing.

John