Can my very old computer be turned into a PVR?

[Hardtarget]

Hey all, I've been thinking about setting up a PVR for a while now, I'm moving at the end of a month and I'm thinking while I'm setting up the new place, it would be a perfect time to set up a PVR.

In my closet I have an old Pentium 3 500 Gateway from a number of years back. I believe it has 384 megs of ram and a geforce 2 mx440 videocard or some crap like that.

I'll probably get a Hauppage 150 first off so I can do Hardware MPEG 2 recording.

So since I'll be doing hardware encoding do I need something faster then a P3 500? And if so does it have to be very much faster? The motherboard can not go faster than 500 I don't think as these were the original Katmai P3s, not Coppermines.

So basically this probably won't be fast enough? What do you all think.

 

[airfoil]

With a PVR150 to handle mpeg encoding, the answer is yes, if you're going to be recording analog video. For HDTV, the minimum is a 2.4 GHz while 3.0 Ghz is recommended.

 

[Hardtarget]

Naw it will just be normal cable. I had been under the assumption you needed at least 800Mhz but maybe that is with no hardware mpeg encoding?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Hardtarget
Naw it will just be normal cable. I had been under the assumption you needed at least 800Mhz but maybe that is with no hardware mpeg encoding?

Right, or if you wanted to play back divx instead of just MPEG2.

FYI you can buy OK DVD-recorders for $150 now, so that's another option.

 

[bocamojo]

I used to run an old EMachines Celeron 600 with 192MB RAM as a DVR, and it worked fine (w/ an ATI Radeon All in Wonder). Just recorded in MPEG 1 format, but that was all I needed at the time. You should be fine setting that machine up as a DVR.