[mythtv-users] Newbie Myth TV questions

[Jarod Wilson]

On Jun 15, 2004, at 23:28, Scott Nicholson wrote:

[snip]
>> Fifth, since the Hauppauges do all the encoding, everything I've read 
>> says
>> that the CPU is practically idle during this work. Does this still 
>> apply
>> when recording and watching separate channels? Will a 2GHZ Intel 
>> machine
>> be enough for that? Again, I don't want to buy a lot more than I 
>> need. I
>> don't want to buy a 3.2GHZ machine only to find I never peak past 5% 
>> of
>> the CPU.
>
> I can only give you my experience, which varies a bit from what you'll 
> be
> doing. My backend is a backend only -- I use an Xbox for a frontend -- 
> so
> there's no decoding going on on the backend. I've not had CPU issues 
> yet,
> though -- the Hauppauge cards do everything, and with two shows 
> capturing
> and a third transcoding (from the 250's MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 to save 
> space) I'm
> still not maxing out the Athlon 1200 I've got in the backend.
>
> Whether that changes when you throw in the decoding required to watch a
> show, I don't know.

For standard-def TV, 2GHz is more than enough for use with any 
reasonable video card. If you're going to use the PVR-350 for output, 
2GHz is drastic overkill. My 1GHz EPIA doesn't even breathe hard 
outputting video with a PVR-350, and I get flawless playback on an 
Athlon 800 w/a GeForce 4 MX. Long story short, the cheapest P4 you can 
find should be more than enough power. Until you get into HDTV, anyhow.

>> Sixth and final, I'm trying to decide between Mandrake and Gentoo. I 
>> don't
>> want to start a religious war. I just want the distro that's going to 
>> give
>> me the easiest setup and preferably be totally compatible with 
>> MythTV. Are
>> there any issues with one vs. the other that I should be aware of?
>
> Most people seem to like Fedora Core 1. I'm using Gentoo myself, with 
> Myth
> built from source (rather than installed as a package -- the gentoo 
> builds
> seem to be lagging quite a bit). It took a bit of doing to get all the
> dependencies satisfied, but it was all pretty straightforward.

I generally recommend using whatever distro you're most comfortable 
with. Unless you really want to take the opportunity to run something 
different for a change (which it sounds like is the case w/the OP). 
"Easiest setup" is somewhat subjective, because if you're extremely 
familiar with one distro, it'll likely be the easiest to set up for 
you, but might not be for someone else. If you simply measure "easiest 
setup" in terms of bare-metal to fully working Myth box, KnoppMyth 
probably wins hands-down.

But then you have to maintain your system. If you don't know the Debian 
way, KnoppMyth might not be so easy to maintain. I know I feel a bit 
lost at times when I use Debian. I use Red Hat, not because I think its 
the best or the easiest, but because its what I know best. I don't want 
to be trying to figure out minutiae, I just want the box to work (and 
so do my wife and kid). I save my experimenting with other distros for 
other machines.

Since the OP already knows Red Hat and apparently wants to try 
something new, I'd say go with Gentoo, since Mandrake is fairly similar 
to Red Hat. However, I'd never call Gentoo the "easiest setup", but I 
do really like it (its one of the four Linux distros I currently run, 
the others being SuSE and Yellow Dog).

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE
jcw at wilsonet.com

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