[mythtv-users] Myth TV media extenders?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Tue Apr 4 14:25:15 UTC 2006


On Apr 4, 2006, at 7:06 AM, Nathan Vidican wrote:

> Similar to Windows Media Extenders; ie Linksys unit, X-Box 360's,  
> etc, and
> similar to cheaper alternatives; is there anything one can do for a
> mythtv-extender like?
>
> Essentially, a bare-bones mythfrontend-driven box with a remote  
> control to
> attach to a TV. The cheaper the better, so long as it works... the  
> idea being
> one large mythtv backend 'server' and a frontend box on each tv in the
> household, will be using Hauppauge PVR-500's for input from three  
> dishnetwork
> satellite receivers, and am looking to possibly add a fourth card  
> for local
> HDTV/SD-DTV signals.

The Hauppauge MediaMVP works great with some limitations:

The changes to the LiveTV system introduced with 0.19 have not yet  
been incorporated into the MVP software, so you can only watch  
recordings. Hopefully this will change soon.

Only MPEG-2 files can be played, the hardware decoder can't handle  
MPEG-4.

It does have a remote and I recently bought one on closeout at  
Circuit City for $39US, I got my first one on sale at Radio Shack for  
$29, so if you look around you can get one cheap.


>
> While I'm at it, any suggestions as to a good HDTV tuner board?  
> Will be going
> into an (possibly) a Quad Xeon 550/2mb machine, with 4GB ram and 6  
> 15,000RPM
> SCSI U160 disks... assuming this machine will be adequate given  
> that I/O will
> most likely be the biggest bottleneck. I might also look to using a  
> single
> 3200 Athlon as a backend box with 10,000rpm s-ata disks in an  
> array. Any thoughts?
>

By "HDTV" do you mean off-air ATSC or cable QAM. I've got an HD-3000  
which works OK for the former but getting QAM to work seems to be a  
royal PIA, at least at this point.

Since I have only the one card I can't speak for any others, there  
may well be better options.


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