hi
i'm using mandrake 10.1 on old hw platform
(pentium II 400 mhz)
video card matrox g400
i'm evaluating to buy a pc tv card that will be also able to work with digital tv that will soon become a standard here in italy...

questions are:
which are performances of video cards ?
or better does they will require a minum hardware to give good performances ?
i do not want to buy a card and then...surprise..see imaging slow down...
so if someone has experience about any suggestion,tip,trick will be very appreciated..
thanks in advance

Maurizio

I have a V-Stream Xpert card (also sold as K-World brand) which is a couple of years old. The box says you need Pentium III 800MHz with 128Mb RAM minimum with Windows 2000/XP.

On the other hand linux may be more efficient than Windows so it still might work, especially as you have a good video card. As an experiment you could look for an MPEG2 video with around 700x400 resolution and see if you can watch it on your 400MHz machine. Maybe DVD playback would be a similar test. I think the MPEG decoding would be the main load on the CPU.

Alternatively you could look for a card with built-in MPEG decoder, but I am not familiar with such things.

Edit: mplayer is using about 15% of a 2.4GHz CPU to watch live digital TV. So it might just work on 400MHz although I would expect to see the picture breaking up occasionally when the CPU falls behind.