Multiple PC's/Tuners

[x_gumby_x]

I am looking for some guidance as to which pc to use to record and which to use to actually watch the recorded shows and live TV. My current pc's are as follows...

#1
Windows 2000
Athlon XP 2500+
512MB DDR Memory
Geforce FX5200
ATI Remote Wonder VE

#2
Windows 2000
p3 866
512mb PC133
ATI Radeon 7000
Hauppauge PVR 250

#3
Mandrake Linux
Athlon XP 2100+
768mb DDR
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
Hauppauge WinTV Go

With my PVR250 in the p3 866 I get horrible stuttering in Live and Recorded TV. I thought with this card my cpu didnt need to be as powerful. I also have the shows being shared to a drive on shared drive on another pc (100mb LAN). If anyone could give me some recommendations as to which pc to use for what or if I should move specific hardware to a different pc it'd be great. I also have a spare P4 2ghz sitting around but it requires RDRAM and the gig of RDRAM I had went tits up awhile back but a new motherboard that uses DDR could be purchased. Thanks for any info/insight anyone can give me.

[Zogg]

The PVR250 reduces the cpu load during recording only. During playback your video card and cpu really come into play.

Your P3-866 box should work fine for recording, but for Live TV you'll have to work at it. I'm still tweaking a P3-1GHz box and IMO its marginable. I may yet drop it and use one of my Athlon XP motherboards instead.

Look for a thread called 'Choppy video' and see some of the tweaks you can try. Using a different encoder with hardware acceleration, a decent video card such as FX5200 is needed, and turn off unneeded services. You might also consider overclocking it a bit to squeeze out some extra performance.

I hope this helps.

Zogg

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Record #1, P3 866, Record 2 (with showsqueeze) AMD 2500, Playback and backup recording, 2100.

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[hoagm]

Originally Posted by Zogg

Your P3-866 box should work fine for recording, but for Live TV you'll have to work at it. I'm still tweaking a P3-1GHz box and IMO its marginable. I may yet drop it and use one of my Athlon XP motherboards instead.

Look for a thread called 'Choppy video' and see some of the tweaks you can try. Using a different encoder with hardware acceleration, a decent video card such as FX5200 is needed, and turn off unneeded services. You might also consider overclocking it a bit to squeeze out some extra performance.

I run an Athalon T-Bird 1.2GHZ and have no choppy video even on "best" quality. The trick is a 3rd party MPEG decoder and video card with hardware acceleration. I run a Radeon 8500 with the Sonic CinePlayer DVD Decoder. I also run a 512mb RamDrive for timeshifting. This not only helps live tv, but it also take a TON of read/write time off your hard drive.

And like Zogg said, make sure nothing else is running on the machine unless you absolutely need it.