Newbie hardware questions

[mattm58]

I'm re-setting up my HTPC and have a few questions:

Currently I have an ATI AIW 128 video card. I used this card previously at different times with both showshifter and snapstream pvs. I'm very interested in trying sagetv now, as it looks much nicer.

My question: this card doesn't have hardware encoding support, that I know of. Can this card be used with sagetv? If not, and I put in a 250, can this second tuner be used for simultaneous recordings?

Thanks,
-Matt

[olyar15]

AFAIK, the AIW cards are not supported in SageTV. If you get a 250, you can use it with Sage and use MMC to control the AIW.

[nicktripp]

For the sake of keeping all of us newbies grouped together, I'll post here instead of starting a new one...

Please indulge my ignorance. I'm ready to give Sage a try but I want to know what the "real-world" minimum requirements are. Will a PIII 733 cut it? If I go with the Hauppauge 250, will I need a vid card with dedicated MPEG2 decoding or can I get decent results with an ATI card that has a TV out?

I plan on building a box dedicated solely to Sage. I just want to know how cheaply it can be done with good results. I'm not opposed to spending money, but since I'm planning on it being dedicated, I was hoping not to go beyond the price of "the great two".

[JasonJoel]

I have used Sage TV with a PVR250 and a celeron 700 MHz and it worked fine. Used an ATI AIW 7500 AGP for the video card because it was on sale.

So although you might not be able to do a ton of multitaking while watching video, it should work.. Did for me at least!

Jason

Originally posted by nicktripp
For the sake of keeping all of us newbies grouped together, I'll post here instead of starting a new one...

Please indulge my ignorance. I'm ready to give Sage a try but I want to know what the "real-world" minimum requirements are. Will a PIII 733 cut it? If I go with the Hauppauge 250, will I need a vid card with dedicated MPEG2 decoding or can I get decent results with an ATI card that has a TV out?

I plan on building a box dedicated solely to Sage. I just want to know how cheaply it can be done with good results. I'm not opposed to spending money, but since I'm planning on it being dedicated, I was hoping not to go beyond the price of "the great two".

[Crazedz]

Yeah i did this as well on a Celeron 600 mhz and it worked fine for me as well. Though the video card with hardware assisted decoding will help lower the proccessor useage some.

So yes i would get one if you can also try and make sure you have a fast enough harddrive and format it to 64k blocks (Supposed to help).

Though you can also get a pvr 350 with onboard hardware decoder but currently that requires you to start the hauppauge software first to enable the decoder then exit and launch sage. I belive they are trying to fix that but i haven't followed it to closely as my Pvr 250 with my Geforce's hardware assisted decoder works well enough on it's own.

On my 1.4 gig Thunderbird i see cpu usage around 14 to 24% even with a Pvr 250 and a DVCR both going at once and watching a show so im happy enough with the assisted decoder.