Possible for USB TV tuner to run on USB1.1?

[HiME]

I currently own a PII 450 system and I fully understand how out of date it is. I'm interested in adding a TV tuner for watching the news and shows.
The problem is this system only has USB 1.1 ports and I'm wondering if the limited bandwidth will cause the video to have a decreased frame rates or make it unplayable.

I also heard that there is something called hardware accelerate for TV tuners which might offload some work from the CPU. If so, which ones will offer these functions.

Also, what's the difference between MPEG2 and MPEG4? I did some research on MPEG but there seemed to be no difference between them.

Advice needed! Thanks

 

[HiME]

Is there any advantage from running a PCI over USB ?

 

[CAL9000]

If you're using a P2, definitely get an internal PCI tuner instead of a USB. Transferring data over USB takes far more CPU power than transferring over an internal bus.

Also make sure the tuner has a hardware encoder/decoder; otherwise it'll probably be unusable on a P2.

MPEG2 is far easier on the processor than MPEG4. Most likely, the tuner will be able to encode/decode mpeg2 in hardware (taking the load off the CPU), but will only be able to encode/decode mpeg4 in software (making the CPU do all the work).

So if you decide to record TV programs, make sure that you enode in mpeg2.

 

[Jeff7]

Do you just want to watch TV, or do any timeshifting? If you just want to watch, get something like the Hauppauge WinTV GO. It just uses a DirectShow window to show live TV, without any MPEG encoding at all. And it does have low CPU usage. I had a TV tuner when I had a Pentium II 300MHz PC, and it still had low CPU usage.