[mythtv-users] MediaMVP

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Tue Dec 14 20:30:57 UTC 2004


Yeah, I love the idea of the mediaMVP, though there is another
alternative, if you have lots more time than money.

Namely, get an old PC, which you probably can get for free or very
cheap from your closet or your company's.   Perhaps a ghz level machine
with 256mb of memory.

Add a TV-out, xvideo capable card (Seen them for under $20.  Search
for "tv-out" in froogle.

Then make it a diskless frontend.   There are two ways to do this.
One is ethernet boot such as pxeboot, though older PCs may not have this.

The other is to boot off the existing otherwise useless hard drive (probably
just a few gb) and do all filesystems over NFS, thus spinning down the
hard drive after boot.


I've been playing with this a bit, it's a bit of slogging.  In fact, I
have an NFS filesystem linux but still having trouble getting X to start
up on it.  But others have done this in a lot of configurations.

Rumour is that the knoppmyth project is trying to do this as well.


However, this will take you more time than the $80 of the MVP is worth.
Of course you would have a fully functioning myth frontend (or backend
for that matter) with all the trimmings, and no hard drive noise or heat.


My current frontend has a noisy drive in it because I plan to get
this working and spin the drive down.

There are many howtos on diskless, here is a more recent one:

http://www.intra2net.com/opensource/diskless-howto/howto.html

My approach however was just to compile in the modules I need into
the kernel and not use the initrd.  That boots into console linux just
fine.


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