Should SageTV Client work OK with my old P4?

[jack_leach]

As a Sage newbie I've been spending about two to three hours every night for the past two months trying to learn about Sage and getting my system up and running (it's been a struggle). Among the many problems that I've worked through, I haven't had time to figure this one out: Should I be able to run SageTV Client or Placeshifter on an old Pentium 4 (3.00 Ghz and 2 GB RAM) and a Radeon 9600 video card (I think it has 128MB memory)? I've tried both Client and Placeshifter (all on a local network with Gigabit Ethernet) with SageTV running on a new Intel "quad" server (see signature). From my P4 client, I get choppy video and high CPU utilization (40% with standard-def video and 100% with high-def video). Would a better video card solve this?

Jack

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by jack_leach

As a Sage newbie I've been spending about two to three hours every night for the past two months trying to learn about Sage and getting my system up and running (it's been a struggle). Among the many problems that I've worked through, I haven't had time to figure this one out: Should I be able to run SageTV Client or Placeshifter on an old Pentium 4 (3.00 Ghz and 2 GB RAM) and a Radeon 9600 video card (I think it has 128MB memory)? I've tried both Client and Placeshifter (all on a local network with Gigabit Ethernet) with SageTV running on a new Intel "quad" server (see signature). From my P4 client, I get choppy video and high CPU utilization (40% with standard-def video and 100% with high-def video). Would a better video card solve this?

Jack

The Radeon 9600 does not have any hardware assist for h.264 that the HDPVR records in. You would need to step up to the AMD Radeon HD 2XXXX series+ to be able to smoothly play back the video. I assume you have an AGP slot which will severely limit your choices.

[jack_leach]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

The Radeon 9600 does not have any hardware assist for h.264 that the HDPVR records in. You would need to step up to the AMD Radeon HD 2XXXX series+ to be able to smoothly play back the video. I assume you have an AGP slot which will severely limit your choices.

Thanks! That's what I suspected. I'll start shopping for a new video card.