[mythtv-users] just bought an SP13000, did I make a stupid mistake?

[R. G. Newbury]

Kevin Slater wrote:
> A little background - I've had a working EPIA M-9000 for a couple of 
> years. It's woefully behind in every way (OS, MythTV version, IVTV 
> driver), but the family uses it daily. (And we don't even have a working 
> IR remote; we use an IR keyboard.)
> 
> So I decided after getting paid for a side admin job that it was time to 
> build a replacement. I just ordered an SP13000 + memory + SATA disk + 
> silent power so that I could build a new MythTV and swap it in. Was my 
> choice of the SP13000 ill-advised?
> 
> I'm not doing HD, and I'll probably use the S-Video out like I do 
> currently with the M9k board. I'm not afraid of patching and building if 
> so required, but I was hoping with the new Unichrome stuff that I'll get 
> much better output than what I currently get with my ancient via drivers 
> in an old RH kernel.
> 

Not a mistake as far as I'm concerned.
You do need the correct hardware:
1)	A PVR-type card or equivalent, so that the mpeg compression is done 
in hardware. The motherboard has hardware decompression to deal with 
playing the streams.
2)	It does need xvmc set up.
3)	It has a single PCI slot, so you may need the original VIA 2 slot PCI 
riser card if you want 2 different tuner cards. Of course the PVR500 is 
a good choice since it gives 2 tuners in one slot. The Via riser does 
the electrical connections on-board and does not require a daughtercard 
stuffed into a pci slot as most do.

I'm running the SP13000 and enjoying it greatly. Now. It wasn't so great 
late last summer, but now it is a breeze. Put Fedora Core 5 on it and 
the kernel modules are up to date and stable. Blacklist the cx8800 
module if you have an HD3000 card. Install ivtv if you have a PVR type 
card. Install the xorg via driver from the rpm at kelkoo.net/epia/FC5 
and you are xvmc ready with a few edits to the xorg.conf file. Done.

And it WILL record from 3 tuners at once AND play back a video all at 
the same time.

Geoff