media portal and xbmc (1 Viewer)

[Anonymous]

hi i was just wondering why MP requires a ghz processor while xbmc runs on a 733 Mhz

 

[samuel337]

I'd say it's for tv recording (encoding is processor-intensive).

But I'm no expert...

Sam

 

[MrMario64]

you have to remember that xbmc is running @ max currently.
When it's postprocessing etc the CPU is very heavily used.

But, the most important thing is really the gfx card.
There r people running MP on a 500Mhz pc
But it's not recommended.

 

[samedney]

I suspect Windows XP uses up a fair amount of CPU / Ram etc too.

 

[MrMario64]

memory yes, CPU no.

My idle CPU is 0-1%
Thats not much.
Running windows is not that heavy on the cpu, it can do it with it's socks off...

 

[Anonymous]

is xbmc compatible with mp (like can i stream live tv to the xbox in the other room)?

 

[LastMar]

I didnt' think MP could "stream" anything...

Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[sporktastic]

You could enable streaming with a modification to the filter graph. It would work just like timeshifting or writing to a file, but instead of going to a file it would go out via tcp. Then you have the player on xbmc able to view the stream. If you add the ability to control the tuner remotely from xbmc then you can use your mp computer as a media server to your xbox.

 

[Anonymous]

Can xbmc play dvr-ms now?

 

[sporktastic]

Until MPlayer can do the dvr-ms files it is probably not going to happen. But if you use media portal instead of XP MCE then you will have supported file formats. For the dvr-ms files the easiest way would be to write a service that uses direct capture to open, decode, resave the dvr-ms as another format like mpeg2 or DivX.

Right now I have an ATI AIW card wich can record in their .vcr format (basically the same thing as dvr-ms which is a custom wrapper around mpeg2, but the ATI version). There is currently a task to get that ability supported within MP. If that happens I will write a plugin / service that will take those files and convert them to divx during the night with it possibly removing the commercials. This way I can save harddrive space and it is a format that is compatible with xbmc. I am looing to put a hauppage 500MCE in my machine, and since it records about 2GB an hour at the highest quality I am probably going to use the same service to reencode those mpeg2 files as divx to extend the drive space. If iI encode all the files that completed the previous day or something as DivX, then delete the original files they will still play perfectly but use about 1/6th the space. If I make it configureable enough it could easily do the translation from dvr-ms to another format provided the filter information is there. Since I do not have a XP MCE computer I will be unable to test it.