[mythtv-users] Setting up MythTV in a wierd way ...

Cory Papenfuss papenfuss at juneau.me.vt.edu
Thu Jan 6 11:01:38 EST 2005


On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, M. Barnabas Luntzel wrote:

> before you get too deep in this, and maybe I dont know about sun blades 
> (definitely dont know much) but is this a sun machine with SPARC 
> processor(s)? Has anybody installed this mess on a sun sparc, maybe sparc 
> linux (solaris seems unlikely)? if there are success stories of mythtv on sun 
> hardware, I will be pleasantly surprised.
>
> then again maybe you just want to process the video files on this box. still 
> do not see how you'll get this stuff to run. under x86 emulation, its going 
> to be dog ass slow (which is pretty slow).
>
> On Jan 5, 2005, at 3:50 PM, Bear Paw wrote:
>
>> My roomate scored some equipment at a .com auction ... a LCD projector, 
>> some
>> SCSI hard drives, some LCD monitors ... but the cream of the crop is a Sun
>> Blade 1000. It has 2 36Gig FC drives, it has one SCSI connector open so we
>> can throw a system disk in there. it has 4 PCI slots and we were going to
>> try to use that for recording/encoding. It has room for one more drive in
>> the case ... I guess we could use an ext. SCSI cage ...

 	Keep in mind that Sun hardware is pretty crappy price/performance 
ratio compared to a modern PC.  They're a tank and will run solidly 
forever, but they're not that fast CPU-wise.  IIRC a blade 1000 is around 
a 600-1000MHz ultrasparc and would probably run linux quite well. 
Whether or not you could get all the mythtv stuff to compile with the 
endian issues is another issue.  You'll also lose a lot of the spiffy 
optimizations (MMX, 3Dnow, etc) so it will probably perform slower than a 
comparable PC, even.  If you just wanted to hang the filesystem/database 
off it, it'd probably work fine.  If you want IVTV hardware support like 
for a backend, it's probably possible, but likely will take some hacking. 
If you want to crunch to DivX, I think you're SOL since it's a binary-only 
codec.  XVid has source so you might have a chance there.

 	In any event, it seems like significantly more trouble than it's 
worth for a <1GHz machine.  If it was a fire-breathing quad processor or 
had 1/2 TB worth of storage it might be more interesting.

 	That was my conclusion when I tried using a B&W G3 450MHz for a 
frontend.  Although the box was much cuter and cleaner than a beige PC, a 
comparable PC (600MHz PII-PIII) is *much* more supported.  Nothing more 
than tweak/hack value, really.

-Cory

*************************************************************************
* Cory Papenfuss							*
* Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student               *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 			*
*************************************************************************



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