[vdr] Re: Minimum Hardware

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.de>]

Mans Krancher wrote:
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm thinking about a minimum Hardware VDR.
> 
> Only one DVB Card and one 80GB HDD will be used. A friend of mine will be absent for 4 weeks and want to record some stuff - nothing more.
> 
> Is it possible to build up such a vdr with a Pentium 1 100MHz, 64MB Ram, onboard S3 Graphics (IBM PC 730)?
> 
> I don't now if it has a DMA Controller for the HDD. If the CPU is too slow, we probably could get something around 150-180MHZ Pentium 1 (all non-MMX).

I had my first VDR running a few years ago on a 
PentiumPro 150MHz with an additional UDMA-66 
controller board.

Without the UDMA, it did not work right.

I also tried the DVB-s board and driver back then
on a Pentium 1 100MHz, which did not work.
Even a 180MHZ Pentium 1 may not be fast enough.

I do not know for sure, but it is possible that
newer versions of the DVB driver require an even
higher CPU clock.

If you want to built a really cheap VDR system,
get a K7S5A Elitegroup main board (68,45 Euro
at http://www.mindfactory.de), which already
has sound and LAN (!) on board and put a 700
MHz Duron into it (44,90 Euro at http://www.silicon3000.de).
That costs next to nothing and will give you
no problems.

Note that you need at least one full DVB-s board
for VDR. AFAIK, the cheap nova boards can only
be used as secondary boards in a VDR system.

Carsten.