In 4220823C.3090609@icem.com, Carsten Koch wrote:
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.
But IME you need over 1.5GHz for a deinterlacing filter if you're using software decoding. My 1.2GHz Celeron can't cope, but a Duron 1800 can (with MPlayer's kerndeint; I haven't tried xine, which has a reputation for higher CPU load than MPlayer). This isn't necessary with hardware MPEG decoders, or with a Matrox's TV-out, but softdevice has a few problems with the latter eg loss of A/V sync when playing back recordings (may be OK with a decent soundcard whose clock closely matches the graphics card's), and not being able to use the mp3/mplayer plugin.