Hardware decoding...........

P

pm1961

Member
My Satellite Setup
PC with Pinnacle PCTV SatCI. DVB Dream viewer. Moteck VboxII positioner. Alba H-H SA58 Motor. 90cm Prime Focus dish on home made adjustable pole. Invacom 0.3dB LNB. Apart from the LNB, all put together embarassingly cheaply mainly thanks to fleabay!
My Location
Hants by the sea PO14 3LT
Hi chaps,

I'm stuck with a low processor speed (Athlon 1.2GHz) at the moment and suffering with a stuttering picture (Matrox G550 AGP card).

I believe I can make things better by having either a dvb card or a graphics card with onboard mpeg2 decoding?

Would I be right in assuming that I'd be best going for a grahics card with onboard decoding? I should add that I don't mind second hand and I don't want to spend much money!

I've tried different combinations of codecs and different DVB viewers with no real gains.

Has anybody got a sure fire combination of getting the processor requirement to rock bottom please?

Cheers,

Paul
 
You need a Skystar1 / Nexus S type PCI reciever that does all the work.

I have used mine successfully with an AMD K6 3 400MHz box with 192Mb of ram, with excellent results. It was however just a bit too slow to record to HD at the same time, but you should be OK with yours.

You need to find a seconhand one of those I think.


Rgds



L.:)
 
Thanks Lancelot,

Would I be right in assuming that the hardware decoding on a graphics card is "too far" downstream of the DVB card to help out?

I have to say that I have had a relatively smooth picture in the past but I don't seem to be able to get back to it!

Even on Astra where I can get 98% quality and 70% strength with the processor running about 20%, the picture stutters.

Any obvious "gotchas" or places to look or edit, gratefully received!

Regards,

Paul
 
You could have a fiddle with loading different codecs and changing graphs depending on which viewer you're using.

As you have had good results in the past it could be time to hoover out your CPU heatsink and apply some quality heatsink compound to help the processor out a bit while you have it open too.



L.:)
 
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