Just to share my experience with really old hardware.
I found a couple of IBM Network Station in the dust bin of a friend company and took them home. They have a Pentium 166, 128 mb ram. I fed one of these with a Nexus and an avermedia 771 (DVB-T). I installed a Suse 10 kernel and using the drivers included in the distribution (installed latest firmware) VDR compiles and Nexus is perfectly recognized - I'm working on the aver, recognized by the kernel but not working on VDR.
I want to say that VDR seems to work flawlessy in this slow environment.
Recording of one channel (RAI 2 on hotbird) results in a 40% CPU, of which 20% for VDR and 20% for system. Ram is almost fully used. Recording of two channels (RAI 1 and RAI 2) makes VDR really irresponsive, but the recordings seems to be ok.
Francesco
Travel Factory S.r.l. wrote:
Just to share my experience with really old hardware.
[...] I want to say that VDR seems to work flawlessy in this slow environment.
The slowest system I used was a Cyrix 150+(no mmx), which is equal to a P1-133, 48MB(or 64MB, i'm not sure) ram and a Nexus DVB-S. All the basic functions and also the mp3-plugin worked. I did not test it with more than 1 recording, but DMA-support for the harddisk makes a big difference! Greets Jochen
On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Travel Factory S.r.l. wrote:
Just to share my experience with really old hardware.
I found a couple of IBM Network Station in the dust bin of a friend company and took them home. They have a Pentium 166, 128 mb ram. I fed one of these with a Nexus and an avermedia 771 (DVB-T). I installed a Suse 10 kernel and using the drivers included in the distribution (installed latest firmware) VDR compiles and Nexus is perfectly recognized - I'm working on the aver, recognized by the kernel but not working on VDR.
I want to say that VDR seems to work flawlessy in this slow environment.
I agree. I've been using VDR in old HP Vectra machine, with Pentium 166 and only 64MB ram. Equipped with fujitsu-siemens dvb-c ff card. Works very very well.
Don't remember now cpu usage, but I have tried recording 3 channels at one time (from same transponder) and watching one recording at the same time, no problem at all. Response was abit slower, but otherwise ok. Live viewing was stuttering when recording 3 channels at the same time.
Same box also plays mp3/ogg music files nicely. Divx playback I have't tried.. ;) But dvds play just nice.
Using VdrAdmin on the machine is abit slow, but still working very well.
Recording of one channel (RAI 2 on hotbird) results in a 40% CPU, of which 20% for VDR and 20% for system. Ram is almost fully used. Recording of two channels (RAI 1 and RAI 2) makes VDR really irresponsive, but the recordings seems to be ok.
I haven't checked mem usage, but my machine has also apache running on it... I't amazing what can be done with just 64mb.
Marko
I found a couple of IBM Network Station in the dust bin of a friend company and took them home. They have a Pentium 166, 128 mb ram. I fed one of these with a Nexus and an avermedia 771 (DVB-T). I installed a Suse 10 kernel and using the drivers included in the distribution (installed latest firmware) VDR compiles and Nexus is perfectly recognized - I'm working on the aver, recognized by the kernel but not working on VDR.
I want to say that VDR seems to work flawlessy in this slow environment.
Sounds good. It's a long time ago I used such a system, so do these old systems really need a fan on the CPU? Would it be possible to cool them with one of the huge coolers (for Pentium IV or AMD) without a fan? I'm looking for a vdr solution without moving parts inside.
Powersupply without a fan would be cool as well, but currently to expensive. Or could I operate one without the fan, as it "just" has to supply a slow Pentium 166 and wouldn't heat up that much?
What about a second FF card in such a system? Too much traffic for the poor old P166?
Thilo
Sounds good. It's a long time ago I used such a system, so do these old systems really need a fan on the CPU? Would it be possible to cool them with one of the huge coolers (for Pentium IV or AMD) without a fan? I'm looking for a vdr solution without moving parts inside.
I run an AMD K6-2 450MHz box with a Zalman flower cooler on it with no fan. I haven't used VDR on it in years since i can't get DVB-T reception at the moment but I backup to it from my lab every night. Uptimes have been around 2 months with no problems and that was limited by power cuts. The case is also full of insulating foam to cut noise. hHe power supply is a Q-technology 300W silent power supply and the system only draws 50W. I would use a fanless PSU with a lower output if I could find one that was cheap.
The loudest noise is now from the hard disks but I keep them spun down the majority of the time (This isn't meant to be good for their lifetime though).
In summary, you should have no problem passively cooling a 166MHz pentium.
Glyn
Powersupply without a fan would be cool as well, but currently to expensive. Or could I operate one without the fan, as it "just" has to supply a slow Pentium 166 and wouldn't heat up that much?
What about a second FF card in such a system? Too much traffic for the poor old P166?
Thilo
Hi,
Travel Factory S.r.l. wrote:
Just to share my experience with really old hardware.
I found a couple of IBM Network Station in the dust bin of a friend company and took them home. They have a Pentium 166, 128 mb ram. I fed one of these with a Nexus and an avermedia 771 (DVB-T). I installed a Suse 10 kernel and using the drivers included in the distribution (installed latest firmware) VDR compiles and Nexus is perfectly recognized - I'm working on the aver, recognized by the kernel but not working on VDR.
I want to say that VDR seems to work flawlessy in this slow environment.
Recording of one channel (RAI 2 on hotbird) results in a 40% CPU, of which 20% for VDR and 20% for system. Ram is almost fully used. Recording of two channels (RAI 1 and RAI 2) makes VDR really irresponsive, but the recordings seems to be ok.
Do you speak of VDR > 1.3.27 with c*Repacker family enabled?
Bye.
-
Glyn Edwards -
Jochen Radmacher -
Marko Myllymaa -
Reinhard Nissl -
Thilo Wunderlich -
Travel Factory S.r.l.