Celeron Powered PVR?

[imatrout]

Are there any problems associated with using a Celeron 2.2 as my PVR engine? I noticed lots of folks use P3 800Mhz and lower. There's some very cheap Dell's that seem like a perfect platform. I plan to use hardware encoding and a high end video card (at least 128 Mb)

Thanks.

[V_D_O]

There should be no problem. Using an HW encoder, and HW/HW-assisted decoding (which most high-end video cards have - many come with codecs you can use for FSUI playback), you should be able to record and playback in the FSUI with no problems, especially in MPEG2 mode - the PVRs can't do WMV so don't worry about that .

[vogelap]

My PVR is running on a 2.0 Celeron machine, and it works just fine! I highly recommend it as an economical platform.

[ynnek888]

I have a celeron 2.4 ghz Shuttle box with a PVR-250, a cheap Nvidia 5200 AGP card 64 megs, and a WD 7200 rpm 8 gig cache HD, built in sound and lan.. running Win2k Pro.. works great..

I actually use the PVR's decoder, which is about 30-50% CPU time when watching video on about a 4 megabit mpeg2. I heard Nvidia decoder is even better, but I have plenty of CPU to spare...

with the PVR doing all of the encodign work, a passive heatsink 5200 vid card, and a relatively cool Celeron, the box stays relatively quiet..

I'd wonder about the built in graphic chipsets that comes with the ultra low end Dells though. Some of their really cheap models don't have an AGP slot either..

I've read that mp3 and mpeg encoding isn't greatly affected by the small caches.....