PII 350 and PVR 250 with Sage

[Crowdx42]

Hi,
I am wondering will a PII 350 cpu and a Hauppauge PVR 250 work with a fast hard drive and 384mb of ram.
I would think that the PVR 250 will work with the PII 350 and that my ATI Vivo 64 card can help with playback>
I am considering setting this up to see how the family like a Sage driven system before I upgrade to a better spec system.
Any advice? Will it work?
Patrick

[TunaBoo]

It will record fine, but playback may be a little slow. Playback is CPU intensive unless you get a PVR 350 or such.

[Crowdx42]

Does the Radeon graphics card not help with it's hardware acceleration?
Patrick

[Opus4]

Originally posted by Crowdx42
I am wondering will a PII 350 cpu and a Hauppauge PVR 250 work with a fast hard drive and 384mb of ram.
I would think that the PVR 250 will work with the PII 350 and that my ATI Vivo 64 card can help with playback>
I am considering setting this up to see how the family like a Sage driven system before I upgrade to a better spec system.
Any advice? Will it work?

See this thread that I wrote a while back, reporting on my results using a P2-400 system.

I don't see that you would have any problem recording, since recording uses very little cpu time. Playback, however, could require a lot of cpu power, depending on your video card. If very little of the decoding process can be done by the video card, your cpu wll have to do it all, resulting in poor playback unless you use a very low bitrate encoding setting.

If you want high qaulity recordings and your video card doesn't do much of the decoding, you would need to get a hardware decoder card, either the Hauppauge 350 or the Sigma Xcard. Currently, the OSD is not vidible on the TV when using either card, but it will work on the 350 in SageTV version 2. I _think_ I read on these forums that you still can't turn off the software decoding when using the 350 w/o other problems, so again it will eat up your cpu. Maybe I'm wrong about that last point, but if that is a current problem, hopefully it will not be a problem in version 2.

Also, you can't play DVDs through the 350, while you can on the Xcard. You have to use something other than Sage to play DVDs through the Xcard, but it will work.

As I mentioned to someone else asking about a slow system... you can do what I did: buy the parts you would use even if you have to buy a faster system. If everything works on the slow system, great; if not, you simply buy the faster system -- no money is wasted since you would have purchased those parts anyway.

For me, it worked out on the slow computer -- I'm still happily using a 250, a PVR-USB2, and the Xcard. That's 2 tuners, 370GB space for TV shows, an FM card, all my ripped CDs, DVD playback capability, family email, etc. I've forgotten what live TV is and never worry about which CD to put into the player.

Your computer isn't much slower than mine, so I don't see why it wouldn't work with a hardware decoder card.

- Andy

[TunaBoo]

On the other hand, a mobo, 1 GHz CPU, and 256 ram can be got for like < $150. It might be worth it for a little upgrade. (I assume your case is an older AT case, but you could find a p3 or celeron that gets you where you need to be).

[Opus4]

That's why I suggested only buying what would be put into a faster system if the slower one was unacceptable. I would have gone with the Xcard anyway for its output quality... ok, maybe not if the G400 hadn't stopped working & I liked its output.

- Andy

[Crowdx42]

How much is an XCard?
As far as I know the Radeon 64 Vivo card I have sitting on the shelf does do hardware DVD decoding (which as far as I am aware all basically MPEG2 decoding)
I think I will try setting this up at the weekend or early next week to just test the configuration.
I know for $170 I can get the necessary upgrades BUT I may instead use that money for a second PVR bundle from Sage. The setup I will try will be probably just totest playback.
I have a PVR 250 presently in my main Barton 3200+ machine with 1.5gig of DDR 400 ram. I may use this as a server and the old machine just to display media recorded on the main machine.
Lots of ideas in my head.

[Opus4]

Originally posted by Crowdx42
How much is an XCard?

Between $80 & $100, depending on the source.

As far as I know the Radeon 64 Vivo card I have sitting on the shelf does do hardware DVD decoding (which as far as I am aware all basically MPEG2 decoding)

Someone else can confirm... it may be hardware assist, but I doubt it is 100% hardware decoding. If it is hardware assist, it may do what you want just fine. However, the Xcard or 350 output is better than most video cards, unless you are going to a TV that takes VGA or DVI style input. (Depends on how important picture quality is to you...)

I have a PVR 250 presently in my main Barton 3200+ machine with 1.5gig of DDR 400 ram. I may use this as a server and the old machine just to display media recorded on the main machine.

You may be better off the other way around, since the cpu load is mainly on the playback/decoding end.

- Andy

[Crowdx42]

Well I am thinking of using the composite output of the Radeon 64.
I would use the fast machine BUT it is my main machine and is too far from the tv to allow tv playback.
I am just gonna experiment with this setup, see what picture quality etc looks like and then if I like what I see I will then take a deeper look at upgrading etc.
Comcast is my cable provider and the will be providing PVR but at an extra cost, I think this sort of system would be a much more cost effective way to go, even if it means extra layout on hardware upgrades.
:-)