[mythtv-users] Building a Simple, Barebones, Minimalist, Cheap Backend

[Brian Wood]

Ivan Kowalenko wrote:
> Hey all. It seems my repurposed HP Pavilion is giving me some trouble,  
> and this might just be the excuse I need for a new back end system.  
> I'm looking at making something smallish (mini-tower or smaller,  
> hopefully), low powered (Geode or Atom might be cool), and cheap (Sub- 
> $250, circa-$100 hopefully). I've already got a capture card  
> (PVR-150), and a pair of hard disks (one 6GB drive for the OS, one 250  
> GB drive for recordings, both PATA), and I'm not looking for any real  
> playback capabilities (I use my laptop as an incidental front-end as  
> I'm the only user of the system). Any advice on where to find  
> hardware? I've looked around at NewEgg and TigerDirect, so far I've  
> got an OK system put together for about $125, but it's using a Via C3,  
> and I have no idea what those things are like. Any advice?

The problem with a VIA CPU is that they are most often attached to
motherboards that use VIA chipsets, and those have been problematical
with MythTV systems. DMA problems mostly.

I think you will find that 250GB is pretty small for recording storage,
I'm finding 1TB to be tight, and that's only for SD. 500GB and 750GB
drives are getting quite cheap (I saw a 500 for $65 yesterday).

The most important thing for a backend is I/O, not CPU, unless you need
fast commflagging or transcoding.

beww