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What to expect? (PVR-Related)

438 Views 2 Replies 3 Participants Last post by  jkaiser, 
Thrillho
The wife's having a hard time getting used to having no PVR in the bedroom, so I told her I'd throw together an old system to do the job. I don't want to sink much (any) money into this so I'm planning on using old parts I've got. My spec will be:


- Celeron 1ghz (Coppermine)

- 512mb Ram

- On-board Via Graphics

- Win-TV PVR 150


The only real requsite is for pausing live tv. Display would be either a 19" LCD monitor or a 25" CRT TV. Recording would only be used very occasionaly. I would also like to stream music and video (non-HD) over the network.


The big question is what software should I use, I obviously fall well below MCE's req's but would sage be any better, what about Myth TV? my only concern is having it share over the network, both ways (all my fileserver's drives are ntfs)
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Z
Your processor is a little slow for smooth mpeg decoding for playback.

You didn't mention whether the graphics have S-Video or composite outputs (to connect it to a TV). The native Hauppauge software will work but file navigation is poor (impossible?) with the remote; keyboard and/or mouse required.


Got an old Hollywood Plus or X-Card around for TV output?


If you have to buy anything then a Media extender like the Hauppauge MediaMVP might make more sense.


Filesharing should not be a problem, Samba might be required if the servers are running Linux.
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J
The 1GHz is plenty for PVRing. It is the onboard graphics that might be a problem since it is shared memory.


I ran a PVR for years with with much the same equipment (PVR-250), except an ATI 32 Meg video card and SVideo out.


I use SageTV (commercial software), but I here pretty good things about GB-PVR (free). Sage is nice since it has it's own EPG but GB-PVR will require XMLTV (free but something more to configure).


Did your PVR-150 come with a remote? Probably not, so that will be another expense to consider as well.
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