[mythtv-users] New house - any advise?

matthew.garman at gmail.com matthew.garman at gmail.com
Tue Jan 16 15:22:01 UTC 2007


On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 11:22:40PM -0400, robin wrote:
> I'm currently in the middle of building a new house. I'm now at
> the wiring stage. I plan to have a backend in my utility room with
> multiple front ends in different parts of the house.

As someone else said, run more Cat 5e/6 than you think you'll ever
need.  I recently bought a house where the original owner had ran
Cat 5.  That was great, but he only ran one line to every room.
That combined with the fact that he *stapled* the wires in place
made it extremely difficult (impossible in some places) to run new
wire.

Hopefully, someday I'll build my house from scratch.  When I do, I'm
going to run a ton of Cat 6 (or whatever the latest generation of
network cable is).  But, I'm going to put it all in *conduit*.  The
intent is to make it easy if I ever need to pull more wire.

> I want the main front ends to be diskless and silent (if
> possible). I was wondering what is the currently recommended
> silent system. I've read about people using eipa boards, is this
> still the best solution? Has anyone tried running a front end from
> a large thumb drive? Or is network boot to a ram drive still the
> best way to go?

As others have said, you probably can't to HD with the Epias, but
they're fine for SD or just music.  If you planned on having several
of these throughout your house, I would definately go the
diskless/boot-from-network route.  Then you implicitly manage your n
machines with only one image.

Actually, you might also consider this in place of the Epias: the
Biostar Tforce6100-754 + Sempron 2800 (socket 754).  You can get
that CPU+motherboard combo for less than $100 US.  The motherboard
allows you to considerably *undervolt* the CPU (even at stock
speeds), so you can approach Epia-like heat and power consumption,
but with a CPU and graphics capable of playing HD.


Matt



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