[vdr] hardware recommendations?

[Carsten Koch]

Craig Sanders wrote:
...
> the main things i'm not sure about are:
> 
>  - what CPU to get?  
> 
>    i'm tempted by an athlon 64, but then i'd have to start mirroring
>    the a64 distribution of debian as well as the i386, and i'm
>    generally not keen to pay a price premium to be a guinea-pig for new
>    hardware....a64 and a64 motherboard designs probably won't be mature
>    for another year or so.
> 
>    other alternatives P4 or and Athlon, with the athlon being slightly
>    cheaper.

VDR works happily with a 150MHz CPU if you have a full-featured card
or with under 1 GHz if you don't.
At least here in Germany the best price per GHz according to
   http://www.geizhals.net/deutschland/?cat=cpuk7sa&sort=r
is an AMD Duron 1800Mhz, which should be more than adequate.

The only function you can always speed up with a faster CPU is
re/encoding for DVD burning, but unless you do that several times
a day, I would not spend extra money for a few minutes less wait time.


>  - what video card to get?
> 
>    i have a matrox G450 in my desktop - is that adequate?  i'm thinking
>    of upgrading my desktop video card anyway, which will leave the matrox
>    spare.  actually, i'm sure it's adequate - the real question is, "is
>    it a *good* card for a dedicated VDR box?"

Matrox cards are know to produce the best signal quality.
So, get an Nvidia card with DVI output and a flat panel for
your desktop (then signal quality will not matter) and use
the Matrox for your VDR system.

Carsten.