I'm using the Plextor on an old P3-500 and the motherboard is a total piece of crap (Acer). I've got 384MB RAM. Suprisingly, it all works really well. Since the Plextor does hardware encoding, you don't need too much horsepower.
I did upgrade my video card to an nvidia 5200 ($35), which is probably not an option on your laptop. I'm not sure how much its really helping me since its on an AGP 1 slot. MPEG4 is working great with the Myth frontend. LiveTV/Recording/Playback all work great. I'm running the frontend on the same underpowered machine as the backend. It is a little slow to scroll the program guide, but that may be a remote control/lirc latency issue. I can't get the xbmcmythtv frontend on the xbox to play the mpeg4 files though. Both xbmc and xbmcmythtv are in active development - so I may have an unstable build of either. Overall, my experience with using the Plextor unit with MythTV has been very good. - Abre On 11/9/05, Brandon Sherman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Interesting... > So, a USB 2.0 card (would also allow a card reader to work for > photos, etc.) and the Plextor? > > > MythTV supports the Plextor out of the box...so to speak. One > > limitation I've found is that although the unit can natively encode > > mpeg2, MythTV only supports mpeg4 on the Plextor. In my case, I've > > been trying to setup xbmcmythtv as a frontend, but it doesn't appear > > to work so well with mpeg4. > > The laptop is a Pentium III 500 MHz with some amount of RAM but > easily upgradeable to 512MB. From reading the various websites, it > seems like a P-III is the bare-bones minimum for a basic T.V. card > without hardware encoder support. I think that the MPEG-4 only will > be ok, but you aren't clear as to how well it works with MPEG-4. Is > it xbmcmythtv with the problems or is the normal frontend also > slightly buggy? > > The laptop has video-out, which should work fine considering it just > mirrors the internal display which is slightly... not working. Hence > this project. > > If I have any more questions, you can be pretty sure that I'll be > asking them on the mailing list here or in some forum somewhere. > N00bie is I. > > Thanks everyone, > Brandon > > On Nov 9, 2005, at 6:08 AM, Abre Chase wrote: > > > I've been using the Plextor ConvertX with Myth. It does have linux > > drivers. I've been using it with Suse 9.3. > > > > http://oss.wischip.com/ > > > > http://forums.divx.com/groupee/forums/a/frm/f/996105602 > > > > I'm not currently using it with a laptop, but I've got a friend who > > does. If your laptop doesn't support USB 2.0, you can just throw a > > PCMCIA card in there. > > > > I picked up my Plextor unit on ebay for about $100 used. > > > > - Abre > > > mythtv-users mailing list > > mythtv-users@mythtv.org > > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users > > > > _______________________________________________ > mythtv-users mailing list > mythtv-users@mythtv.org > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users > > > _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users