Minimum System Requirements

[GregHT]

Hi,

Has anyone tried running Sage Recorder on a system less then the minimum requirements?

In particular, I have a Pentium II 400MHz that I currently use with Showshifter. This uses the CPU to encode, so I was surprised to see the higher requirements for the Sage Product.

I desperately want to use a hardware MPEG encoder, so SAGE Recorder looks ideal (I live in Australia, therefore SageTV isn't applicable).

Has anyone tried Sage Recorder on something like a Pentium II 400Mhz?

Thanks,

Greg.

[dkardatzke]

Greg,

I would recommend downloading the Trial version of SageRecorder and testing it on your PC. The system requirements we list on the website, are just the "recommended" system requirements and don't necessarily mean that either SageTV or SageRecorder won't work on less powerful systems.

You can access the download here: http://www.freytechnologies.com/srdownload.html. Let us know what you find out!

Thanks,
Dan

[GregHT]

Hi,

Thanks for replying so quickly!

The only problem with this approach is that I'd have to buy a PVR-250 just to test it.

Hopefully someone will have tried it on a less powerfull system and report back.

Greg.

[SHS]

GregHT it may or may not work well because of software mpeg decoding but that depend on the bitrate you are using but there are way around this.
Use a reg TV set to see the what your watching and turn off Perview mode in SageRecorder that keep you CPU usage down.

[Narflex]

You can definitely do it on a 400 MHz for encoding. That's easy. What you might not be able to do is view the video while it's recording or play it back. The CPU power is needed for MPEG2 playback. So if you're just using this box as an encoding machine and are going to watch files off it over the network, you're OK.

If you also want to use it for playback, it depends heavily on what kind of graphics card you have and what kind of MPEG2 decoders you have installed. Some MPEG2 decoders claim they can give solid performance on that kind of machine, and I wouldn't doubt it with the MPEG2 acceleration on graphics cards nowadays.

So if you're only using it for recording, a 400MHz machine is perfectly suitable. If you also want to use it for playback, like most people will, then a 400 MHz may work with the right graphics setup, but you're really cutting it close.

[GregHT]

Thanks for the replies,

It sounds as if it might be worth a try.

By the way, I have no problems playing DVD's on the machine with PowerDVD.

Would there be any difference between the SageRecorder generated MPEG2 files and those on DVD's?

I'm keen to keep this machine since it is quiet, cool and like that everready bunny, just keeps going and going and going.

Thanks everyone for all your replies.

Greg.

[Narflex]

If PowerDVD can playback DVDs fine; then you should have enough horsepower to run Sage. Enjoy.