[mythtv-users] living room myth pvr

Timothy Waters timothy.waters at gmail.com
Sat Apr 1 03:29:41 UTC 2006


that does sound like a good idea. Thanks for the advice. I am thinking that
I might get a tower case and throw in a blazing chip and a gig or two of RAM
and one of my existing hdd's and my pvr-250 and ... aww hell... I might as
well just save up about one or two paychecks worth and just get everything
at once... I hate to have a half-finished system and I don't want to take my
current dvd-player with me when I get a new place. oh well... I like your
idea and I will end up doing something like that.

On 3/31/06, Dewey Smolka <dsmolka at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/31/06, Timothy Waters <timothy.waters at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How about smallish, easier to get working, but don't worry about the
> cost. I
> > was thinking about maybe a shuttle case or something along those lines.
> I'll
> > be buying this probably one or two pieces at a time so cost isn't my
> > concern. I want it HDTV ready as well. Thoughts?
> >
>
> Based on the ideas that 1) cost is not really an issue; and 2) you'll
> be building piece by piece, here's what I'd recommend:
>
> Start with a combined FE/BE in a mid-tower or tower case. This is
> mainly because you'll want the room for expansion devices and drives,
> and you'll want to leave enough space for airflow. Start with an SD
> setup using Hauppage PVRx50 card(s) -- much simpler to get going (plus
> most programming is still SD-only anyway).
>
> Although you won't be doing HD yet and the horsepower requirements of
> this kind of system are quite modest, make sure you have a strong
> processor -- it will certainly help with transcoding and com flagging.
> Once it's running well, then expand to HD and XvMC.
>
> This is where the big case becomes important -- you can record SD with
> good quality at 1-2 GB/hour, but HD will need at least 7-8 GB/hour.
> You'll eventually want to fill up that tower with big drives, LVMed
> and RAIDed, especially if you plan on recording a lot of HD content.
> Plus you'll want all your tuner cards in this machine.
>
> Once you're happy with how that's working out, you'll want to build
> your beautiful, small, quiet frontend. This will also need quite a
> beefy processor to handle HD, but you only need a small disk for OS,
> or run in diskless with network boot.
>
> At this point you can take your tower with all the drives and put it
> somwhere that all the wires (not to mention drive whirring and fan
> humming) won't bother anyone.
>
> All in all, this type of setup will not be cheap, but the expense will
> be spread out over a long time. It will also allow you to get up and
> running quickly, cheaply, and (relatively) easily.
>
> Just my $0.02.
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--
Timothy Waters
timothy.waters at gmail.com
http://www.e-Waters.org
205-587-9001

"It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of
man." Albert Einstein(1946)
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