800 Athlon with 500 MG RAM Good Enough?

[jeffagreen]

I'm trying to build a PVR system using snapstream with an 800 Athlon, 500 MB RAM, 128 ATI Radeon All In Wonder Pro and 120 GIG hardrive on an old FIC SD11 board. I'm not running anything else on this machine. So far, it's been awful, but I just saw the tip about needing the MPEG 2 codec and will try the DVD codec from ATI although it looks like I can't use anything past 7.1 version of the ATI DVD software... But I wanted to make sure, before I spend another night tinkering, if anyone has gotten good performance with a chip this slow and a card this old. I'm trying to re-use parts that were retired from regular use, basically.

Thanks,
JG

[Brett]

Not going to happen...first and foremost you meet about half the minimum requirements, its not far from "easily" usable but it nots going to work well without upgrading.

You need a PVR250 hardware encoder to significantly reduce the stress on the cpu (infact with the 250 the cpu usage is less than 2%). I am not sure which AIW you have but unless its a 9000+ version, I would recommend you pickup a GeForceFX 5200. Both items together will run you about $200 without much price hunting. You should have descent results after that.

The RAM is fine, and the CPU should be fine if you have a hardware encoder.

-Brett

[Rita]

RadioActive is right, you won't be able to make it work with the ATI All-in-wonder TV tuner and that CPU. I tried the AIW 7500 with and Athlon 900 and the third party decoder, always timeshifting off, and "good" settings. Live TV was never watchable. I was however able to use it as just a recorder. I wouldn't have tried to playback or doing anything else at all at the same time it would have been too much for that CPU. But if you do nothing else, and reboot every 2 or 3 days, it may work ok as a recorder/playback when NOT recording. (It was not very stable.) I tried the AIW in a couple other PCs: one with an XP1700, which was usable but not great, and currently with an XP2600 which works great for me, very stable, looks very good to me, except maybe if you're watching sports-which I don't.

edit: AIW 9000Pro in the XP2600 PC. (Not that I've noticed much difference between the 7500 and 9000). The PVR250 is better.

[jeffagreen]

Just to be clear, you're saying I need a PVR250 AND a new video card? I didn't look as closely at the PVR250 - so it's just a capture card? I guess that makes sense, but just wanted to make sure. That sure explains why I was having such bad results. I have another 2600 Athlon with an ATI 9600 SE 128 on an ABIT NF7-S board with a Gig of dual channel DDR Ram that I use for gaming and making home movies of the kids, but I don't want to tie that machine up as a PVR, too. I was hoping I could keep using the old board and chip. Sounds like I can with the right video card and encoder. Thanks for the quick response, BTW.

Thanks.
JG

On a secondary note, lets say I get this thing working correctly and get recordings, what are your suggestions on recording quality if I wanted to burn them to a DVD to watch on TV? With my 120 GIG HD, I can get quite a few shows on the machine, but I may not always want to watch them on the PC and my PVR machine is down in the basement where all the cable modem, cable and network connections are set up for my house so it's not in a good place for easy TV out...

[jeffagreen]

On another note, I see in Bret's machine description that you send the signal back up through the coax to TVs. I had my house wired with dual coax to each TV, so I'm guessing there's a way I can have my basement machine feed stuff to the other TVs in the house if I set it up right. Any tips on how you did that? I didn't notice that until after my other post, so excuse all the copy, but I've been wanting to do this for a while and you guys seem to have it figured out. This just seems more fun that buying a TIVO box and not having any control over the machine.

[donnieSoprano]

jeffagreen,

the 800mhz machine should do fine once you get the pvr-250 card. i'm running a p2-400 and it works perfectly. the ATI card should work ok for playback (i'm using an AIW 128), but you'll probably have to perform the registry hack mentioned elsewhere in the forums.

do a search for posts by me and you'll see in more detail about my setup.

ds

[jeffagreen]

Thanks for the feedback - but which registry hack? I'll do a quick scan to see if I can figure out, but if you can point me more specifically, that'd be great...

JG

[Eric3a]

On another note, I see in Bret's machine description that you send the signal back up through the coax to TVs. I had my house wired with dual coax to each TV, so I'm guessing there's a way I can have my basement machine feed stuff to the other TVs in the house if I set it up right.

Use a modulator. My house, like yours was setup with 2 coax cables at each location.
The modulator I use is:
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.as...2&loc=111&sp=1

Then, use a splitter to send that signal to all TVs.
Eric

[jeffagreen]

This is a really dumb question, but all my cables are just terminated in the basement near the hookup - there's no key to tell me where they come from (the guy who installed was forced on us by builder and did a real bad job). Any easy way to figure that out? I'd probably only want to be able to send to two rooms, not the whole house, since I'd also have to set up an A/B switch to direct the feed at each TV, too. What did you run out to the modulator? If there's a web page that explains how to do this, I'm glad to look there, too, rather than bothering you with the details. I think this would be a much better way to do this for programs that I wanted to watch in another room but didn't really feel like burning a DVD to do it...

[donnieSoprano]

fejjagreen,

registry hack

http://discuss2.snapstream.com/vb/sh...+registry+hack

ds

[Brett]

First to do this I think you might have to get rid of the AIW 128 anyway, unless it already has SVIDEO output. I am not sure if the 128 actually does. Either way performance during playback (as far as starting video / OSD) will be greatly improved if you add the GeForceFX 5200 to the setup.

Regardless you take the Svideo output + Audio output (use a headphone to RCA convertor on the Audio its like a $5 Radioshack piece) and plug those two things into the modulator, the modulator will output coax cable. You need to find where the cable is being terminated. If you have a cable feed on both coax jacks in the house that means it was likely split in the basement where the cable comes into the house. Find this spilt, and "break into it" by feeding the computer output instead of the cable from the outside just on one of the cables. Take the cable from the outside and feed it into the computer. Thus making a close-circuit loop. Use a RF remote control to change channels / control BTV throughout the house from any tv that is on the second input.

-Brett

[jeffagreen]

Ok, so I got a WINTV PVR 250. But you're saying you don't think the AIW will be able to handle the output duties? What about a NVidia Geforce 4600? I have one of those, too. I don't know if it had TV out, though. It does have the dual monitor support Thanks for the help so far...

[donnieSoprano]

jeff, try the AIW before you give up. the card you have appears to be the next model up from mine...mine works great.

i'm not trying to slight radioactive, but don't go out and buy a card just because someone on the board says they don't think it'll work out. by the same token, don't keep the card just because someone else says to keep it. try it, if you're not happy, then explore other avenues.

like i said above....i'm runing 1/2 the cpu horsepower that you are and have no problems with my setup.

ds

[jeffagreen]

Well, I'm just playing around but so far it seems to record really well and play Live TV pretty choppy. I'm not really looking to use this TV to play live TV, though. I'm more interested in watching the shows elsewhere. Is there something else going on, other than the AIW card, that would make Live TV play choppy? I guess I'm most interested in donniesoprano's response, since he's running a similar setup right now...

[Brett]

You should certainly try the AIW card, I did not mean to imply you should not atleast try it. It was simple that I thought that might be the bottleneck in the system, so if after trying all else, if you still were not satisify I felt that would be the likely reason why.

You may want to try the nvidia hack drivers. You can learn more about them here:
http://discuss2.snapstream.com/vb/sh...ht=nvidia+hack

Although keep in mind this might not hurt more than help...but everything has an "undo" button.

If you just plan on doing recording on the machine, playback will likely be fine from any other machine as it is. Try d/ling the files it creates somewhere else and playing them on a faster machine, I suspect it will playback much better.

-Brett