Old PC to PVR?

[Zeiff]

I have an old P3 650mHz PC collecting dust. Is there enough under the hood to throw in a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 and dedicate it to being a PVR? I hope that the hardware encoding of the 350 would take some of the stress from the P3. Would it be enough for TIVO like functionality? Would Linux and MythTV free up resources instead of using windows? Interested in everyone's take on whether the task is worth it.

Thanks,
Zeiff

[edDV]

That machine is right on the edge of system spec. You may have difficulty making a DVD on that machine but you could always network MPeg2 files to a faster machine for DVD authoring.

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr350_datasheet.htm
System Requirements:

* Processor requirements:
* Pentium® II processor 600MHz or faster for TV pause with full screen playback
* Windows®98SE (Second Edition), Windows® Millennium Edition, Windows2000 and WindowsXP.
* Free PCI slot
* Sound card
* CD-RW writer (optional for burning Video CD’s)
* VGA card (PCI or AGP) which supports video overlay (NVidia, S3, ATI, etc.)

[classfour]

I built a PVR using a mini case bought from ebay, micro ATX mobo with 2.4 Ghz celeron, 512 MB RAM, Video card with TV out, 40GB HDD, and Hauppauge Win TV PVR150 low profile card. I'm guessing the MPEG encoder built into the card really helped out the system, as the video captured from cable is outstanding - much better than any other card that I've used: Even with the reviews given to the PVR150. Everything was recorded to a removable HDD for editing in another machine.

Why use the 2.4? It was what I had in hand at the time. If I'd had an old 1.0 Ghz machine, I would've tried it. As to the 650, I'd go with edDV on the specs: You'd probably get some substandard captures with the rig.

[mats.hogberg]

As the 150 uses hardware encoding, processor specs doesn't affect the capture quality. If anything, it's the playback that will get into trouble.

/Mats

[irongang]

I don't know about the Hauppauge, but I had the exact same idea. I'm running my old PIII 700mhz with my ADVC-100 as a dedicated capture box. It works great. It does nothing but capture video to be moved to my main computer when needed for watching/editing. Mainly the video is moved over the network, but each computer has swappable drive bays so that I can just yank out the whole 200GB and walk it over if needed. This computer is also much smaller than my tower and I can take it on the road to capture on site if need be. All in all it's a nice setup for an otherwise useless PC.

Oh, I've got two drives so that I can capture to one and move data off of the other at the same time. It can actually do both from the same drive simultaneously but I figured why push my luck.