Computer Requirments for DVB Card

[Wholeshoe]

All

What would you recommend as a bare bones computer to use a PCI card in. Min CPU Speed, RAM, etc...

I would want to buy or build a computer for as cheap as possible.

Wholeshoe

 

[Wayn23]

All

What would you recommend as a bare bones computer to use a PCI card in. Min CPU Speed, RAM, etc...

I would want to buy or build a computer for as cheap as possible.

Wholeshoe

It all depends on what you want to receive with it, if you want to do HD
I would recommend a Athlon running at 2ghz actual speed or a P4 2.4ghz
if you are only going for 4:2:0 SD I know that a 1ghz P3 works just fine.
I use 512mb ram in all my computers so I can't comment on how well the
cards work with less ram. If you run a Netstream 2000 decoder card you could do 4:2:0 SD with a very slow computer, I paid $44 for mine about a
year ago but I don't Know how easy they are to find anymore. I got my Twinhan 102g for $59.95 so you could probably get a DVB card and a Netstream for just over a $100 and run it in any computer you can find.
If you want to record and keep allot of stuff for later viewing make sure you get a big Hard Drive.

 

[Cascade]

Here's the short answer.

If the machine will play DVDs it'll work fine with a software-based DVB card.
1.4GHz CPU, 256MB+ RAM along with most models of AGP/PCIexpress graphics card will work nicely.

 

[Wholeshoe]

So my work laptop with a DVD player in it ought to work.

It's a IBM ThinkPad A21M. It has 256 Meg of ram but only has a 650 MHz processor yet seems to play DVD's fine.

I guess I would have to by the new USB type card for it. Is that USB 1.0 or would I need 2.0 because I don't have 2.0.

Also HD and 4.2.2 wouldn't be an option with this machine?

Wholeshoe