CPU requirements for tv server serving HD channels? (1 Viewer)

[kaisersose]

I'm building a media server atm (have the parts just putting it together atm). It has a sempron le-1250 cpu and a gigabyte 740g motherboard, 4gb ram (well whatever 32 bit windows see's) along with a load of harddrives. Anyways I have being thinking about putting tv cards in this server. And I'm just wondering what are the requirements for HD channels on the tv server. Server itself will not be used for watching tv. Does it still need a good cpu or graphics card thats does hardware acceleration? Or will a 2.2ghz sempron le-1250 be ok?

any info would be appreciated

 

[craigparris1]

Hi kaisersose,

I don't know the architecture of MediaPortal intimately, but I would imagine that if you have just a TV-Server, which is only serving up the TV stream to clients and not actually being used for watching TV on that machine, then the CPU requirement will not be particularly high. It should just be passing the incoming stream off to the clients - not doing any decoding of the signal itself. It will be the client PCs that will need either a high speed CPU or a graphics card with hardware acceleration.

In my case, I'm running an AMD le-1600 (2.4 GHz, I think) in a single-seat machine (ie. TV-server and MediaPortal client), with a GeForce 8500GT graphics card. I don't actually output to a HD TV, but I can watch HD channels with no problems and the CPU load is hardly anything at all.

Cheers,
Craig

 

[PABeaver]

I currently run a Duron 950 with 640MB of RAM on my TV server and am recording HD and streaming HD. CPU should not be a problem, the only thing to worry about is the throughput of the hardrives if the recordings are high bit rates and you are watching and recording at the same time. Also, your server would not need a GPU if you are not planning on hooking up a monitor to it, as it would not be doing anything (that I know of at least) except consuming a lot of power.