[mythtv-users] mythtv hardware plans

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Thu Feb 8 21:41:04 UTC 2007


And don't forget, if you live in a place with expensive power, plan
to do some power conservation if you plan to save money.

Here in California now, I've found myself moved into the 3rd tier
of power cost -- using twice the baseline of 300 kwh/month.  This means my
incremental kw/h are costing 30 cents.

That means a 100 watt computer, on 24/365 uses $262 per year of
electricity.   Over the typical 3 year life of a computer, that means
the electricity costs more than all the hardware.

(Yes, it turns out I would be making a stupid decision to have a
full PC as my PVR instead of a low power Tivo just to "save" the
Tivo monthly fee.  However, I want Myth over Tivo for more reasons
than the fee.)

That can make a big difference on decisions like having multiple
backends and frontends, and starts making immediate calls to not
have the machines on all the time.

Mythtv supports such functionality, though it's not the most commonly
used part of the system.   Unfortunately, getting things like hibernate
and suspend to ram to work with Nvidia cards with their proprietary
drivers is not at all an easy task -- though I'm afraid these are the
cards/drivers I would recommend for Myth.   Full off/full reboot is
easier to make work, but of course means a long startup time for
frontends.

Myth even supports clock based restart, though since my master backend
is already a server I need to keep on all the time (eating that annoying
cost) I have not investigated it.

But if cost is an issue (or being green) and you live in a high
electricity cost area, you may want to consider carefully plans that
call for always on PC based servers.

Down the road it would be nice to consider a Myth backend system
designed to run on a super low power device like one of those USB
disk servers, connected to an HDHomeRun or USB tuner card, spinning
down disks when not in use etc.


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