[mythtv-users] Seeking hardware opinions

[John Gruenenfelder]

Greetings all,

I am preparing to purchase some hardware for my own MythTV box and I was
hoping for some feedback.  I'd like to avoid any mistakes before spending any
cash.

First, one of the goals I am trying to accomplish is to have as silent a box
as possible.  It will be in my room near the TV and I hate PC noise when I'm
trying to sleep.

Hardware:
VIA Epia MII 6000E mainboard w/ 600MHz Eden ESP fanless processor
Morex 3688 mini-ITX case
Hauppauge PVR-250 MCE
2.5" HD (probably 4-12 GB)
slim DVD-RW/CD-RW drive
256MB DDR memory

That's about it.  I will be using NFS for the actual video storage, as you
might have guessed from the HD size.  The VIA board has TV-out support and
hardware MPEG-2 decoded, though I'll probably just do software decoding
because of the support for more formats.

600 MHz is the fastest fanless CPU offered on that board.  Will that be
sufficient since I'll be using hardware encoding?  I've played DVDs with a
500MHz processor before and didn't have any problems.  I'm fairly sure that
the onboard video has Xv support so that should help the CPU out a lot.

I've read that there are some issues with the PVR-250 MCE card.  It seems that
there are two different versions of the card.  Which do I want and how can I
tell which is which when ordering online?  I'd like to get the MCE version
since it has an FM tuner which I hope to make use of in the future.

I've already got an RF remote for controlling the thing.  The input will be
from a DirecTV box, but as I've found from this mailing list, I can still use
MythTV to tune it, so that won't be a problem.

Thanks in advance for any feedback!


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, Steward Observatory, U of Arizona
                        johng at as.arizona.edu
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