[mythtv-users] Cheap and quiet hardware for SD MythTV - possible?

[Robert McNamara]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Stroller<stroller at stellar.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 30 Jul 2009, at 20:44, Simon Hobson wrote:
>>
>> Stroller wrote:
>>
>>> My mum's Freeview box has just died - since a replacement is £30, I
>>> started thinking about a PVR instead. Off the shelf ones are £80 to £100 and
>>> this naturally started me thinking about MythTV, but I'm a bit stumped on
>>> how to do MythTV without doubling the price.
>>
>> ...
>>>
>>> it's kinda a shame the hardware options don't seem to have improved much
>>> in the last couple of years [1]. Or am I missing something?
>>
>> Realistically, you aren't going to build a Myth system for less than you
>> can buy an off the shelf box. I doubt if anyone involved has ever thought
>> about it as a cost saving effort - more as a means of getting better
>> features without the lock in to be found on many boxes.
>
> Sorry, I thought it was obvious I didn't want to BEAT the price of one of
> these cheapo units. But I thought to be able to do better than TWICE the
> price. Particularly because one will always have a spare hard-drive lying
> around, and maybe RAM, too.
>
> I guess I was hoping for the £120 - £140 range, buying cheap low-power PC
> components.
>
> It'd obviously be really nice if I had found a cheap set-top-box that could
> be hacked for MythTV, and Neuros OSD seems like the right price, but it
> looks like it's maybe at a bit of a dead end?
>
> In this case, quality isn't of the highest priority. Composite out is fine,
> but DVI/HDMI would be really nice for future-proofing. It only has to do SD,
> and a single tuner.
>
> If it's price-comparable with the £60 Atom-based board(s?) currently
> available then the "first ION board with PCI socket" post looks ideal, but
> only if I can find a case which isn't silly money.
>
> Stroller.
>

The ION Boards are being hotly anticipated as frontends, but I would
never want to run a combined frontend/backend on them-- It will do
everything you need a backend to do... eventually.  I have become so
accustomed to things like realtime commercial flagging, huge DB
lookups, etc. that I wouldn't want to delve into ION land for a
combined system.  You can probably find a nice ION frontend for a few
hundred pounds, but you are still going to need to find a reliable
backend, some tuner cards, and disk space for your recordings.  In
short, I think <200 Pounds for a *full* myth system will be
sacrificing too much performance to make it worthwhile.

Robert