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cheaping out on htpc?

M

MikeF98765

Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2003
Messages
629
hey all, im a poor college student, but i've been wanting to build a home theater pc forever now. What i need the comp to do is

1) Run a myHTPC front end
2) Play Divx movies
3) Play DVDs not so important
4) Play MP3's
5) Play emulators.
6) Possible PVR in future.

I have it set up on my laptop right now and it works awesome. The only thing is i might be buying a compaq pavillion P3 computer. Would it being a pentium 3 hinder performance a lot? Divx's website only requires a p2, so i think im ok, but would it really be bad? Also using a Geforce 4 mx440 card?

Do you see any problems? And if i bought a pvr card would that have problems with it being a p3? I dont know the speed of the processor yet, but im pretty sure im buying it, can't go wrong for 50 bucks. And ram isn't a problem, thats cheap, and he already added more.
 
Hi

I have a myHTPC box running on a AMD 1800+ and the cpu only ever goes over 20% when I watch DivX/DVD (got an ati 9200se vga as it was cheap and I don't use that rig for games). So for MP3, internet surfing etc a P3 should be fine.

BUT - If you plan on using the box as a PVR system then you will probably need more CPU horse power though (i.e. timeshifting, watching while recording other channels). It will depend on what PVR card you use though.

As long as the PVR card is a PCI card with hardware MPEG 2 encoding you should be fine (the favourite card of the moment is the Haupauge 250).

If you try a USB card it will only be USB 1.1 so you may have limited capture resolution (a P3 mother board won't have USB 2.0 ports). Obviously you could buy a USB 2.0 card to add in, but you are keeping budget in mind with you setup. Also if you try to do PVR functions in software (i.e. offloaded to the CPU) then I guess the P3 will not be enough (P3 limited to 1 GHz max).

However, this guy http://www.linuxprofessionalsolutions.com/pavlicek/tv.html has a 400 MHz box doing time shifting running Linux so maybe look at that route?

Hope that helps

L

edit - this link has some CPU comparisons for older chips http://tangentsoft.net/video/mpeg/reviews/pvr.html
 
cool. I dont watch much tv so i'll probably hold off on the PVR stuff till i get home for the winter. I'm gonna go try it out and see how it works. If i need to do linux to get rid of some overhead i'lll try that out.
 
A P3 will work fine and if you want to go TV soon you'll want to get a hardware based encoding card.
 
ok well its playing divx's very choppily... am i missing some hardware acceleration setting or something?
 
you have latest vid card drivers, right? try mplayer classic (search on sourceforge.net) and see if it handles it any better. also, try muting sound, as this can cause problems. if that's the case get the latest drivers for the sound card.
 
nm just needed a restart. works fine now, its a little slow going through myHTPC but once you play a movie it works fine.
 
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