[vdr] Re: Why Hauppauge say PIII 500 Mhz requiered with Nexus and nova cards ???

[Dennis Noordsij <dennis.noordsij@wiral.com>]

On Monday 14 October 2002 12:45, you wrote:
> Each time I see one of this card, as minimal requiered setup, I see
> "Pentium III 500 Mhz".... Why ? Is theses cards really needs such power to
> work fine ?
>
> what's the diffrence between the nova and the Nexus ?

Nova-T (the -T is very important) is a so called budget card, it does not have 
an MPEG2 decoder or tv-out. So in order to watch TV, your CPU needs to do all 
the work (=Pentium III 500), unless you have an MPEG2 card (such as the dxr3) 
or a full-featured DVB card (which has TV-out).

Nexus as far as I know is always a full featured card. Nova (without the -T) 
is also. 

The requirements are for time-shifting, where the card is recording one 
channel, and you are viewing a recording, but the recording is played in 
software (= needs a CPU capable of playing a DVD without hardware support, 
hence the PIII 500).

Currently the Linux drivers can use the card both for recording AND playback 
at the same time (which I can't vouch for yet since I have not tested it) - 
this means your machine should be plenty fast for recording/playback at the 
same time since both use the card's hardware to do all the work.
Under Windows it can not do that, hence the CPU needs to be fast to play back 
in software-only.

DVB under Linux is currently not a plug and play thing, it does work 
beautifully but it can be a lot of work sometimes to get everything set up. 
Keep that in mind before investing a lot of money in such a card. 



> If I get one of this card with a PII 400 Mhz under Linux + VDR, will I be
> able to record without problem ? Will I be able to watch divx smoothly ?

DivX does not use the card for hardware acceleration, so if you can watch a 
divx otherwise with your PC, you can also watch it with the card installed of 
course. There is a plugin which partially decodes the divx, then reencodes to 
MPEG1 (or 2) so it can use the hardware decoder on the card as well as the 
tv-out. (and have everything nicely integrated in DVR).

Again though, it can be a struggle sometimes, if you feel the card is quite 
expensive (it is!!) to just play with, don't buy it just yet. 

Feel free to ask more,
Dennis




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