Entertainment System

[Married2Lori]

I've always heard that when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I have a K6-2 350Mhz system with 64MB memory, and 32Mb video card with TV-out.

It has occurred to me that with this software, a TV tuner card, a DVD drive, a bigger hard drive, and good speakers I could have a fairly decent home entertainment system to record tv, play DVD's, surf the internet, and play games.

I'm guessing this would require an outlay of about $500. for the necessary upgrades. (plus I could upgrade the processor to 550 mhz and memory to whatever would improve performance.) Add a CD burner, and I can even archive shows.

Am I missing something. If this is so easy, why isn't everybody doing it? Is the 350 mhz (or 550 I could upgrade to cheaply) going to be too slow?

[Daniel Broad]

Originally posted by Married2Lori:
I've always heard that when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I have a K6-2 350Mhz system with 64MB memory, and 32Mb video card with TV-out.



The AMD K6-2 has abysmal floating point performance, you'll need to upgrade your CPU and motherboard. What you can (i did) do is build yourself a more powerful machine for recording - your K6 will play video and music fine.

[Rendus]

Yep, the K6-2 350 (I have a 300 and 333 myself) won't really cut it, the 550 would possibly do OK, I'd check out how it performs on the 350 and go from there.

As far as why everyone isn't doing it, it's because many don't know how. I did tech support for Dell for about a year, and currently do tech support for Cox@Home, and explaining concepts as simple as right-clicking can be painful. Explaining the idea of watching TV on a computer, or displaying the computer output on a TV is absolute torture (I've had to do it several times).

It's one of those things that have a relatively high entry level if only because people don't understand the concepts. So right there you have a rather limited audience. Then, of that market you have to find the people who want to do this sort of thing. Those are even more rare. Then, gotta find people with coapable hardware.

All things considered, there are plenty of people doing this sort of thing.

[bravesfan]

Some more about the AMD chips:
I'm running Snapstream on a K6-II, 475 Mhz machine with windows 98. I can record at the 'Cable/DSL-Medium' setting well, but any resolution higher than that results in massive loss of frames, and the sound ends up recording faster than the video encodes. Do the Durons/Celerons have this same problem?

[This message has been edited by bravesfan (edited 02-13-2001).]

[Daniel Broad]

Originally posted by bravesfan:
Do the Durons/Celerons have this same problem?

I have a Duron 700 machine built especially for Snapstream and it has CPU usage of about half of what my AMD K6-2 500mhz had at the same quality setting.