[mythtv-users] Initial foray into Mythtv
R. G. Newbury
newbury at mandamus.org
Sun May 10 21:44:37 UTC 2009
Brian Wood wrote:
> On Sunday 10 May 2009 13:30:27 Matthew Keefe wrote:
>>>> Capturing already digitized material requires little CPU, just disk I/O.
>>>> The
>>>> hardware you describe should be able to play back SD, but probably NOT
>>>> HD. You might even need XvMC for SD playback, a 1.8 Ghz. single-core CPU
>>>> is pretty slow by modern standards.
>> I've been reading up on this more (as I should have before buying the new
>> card :/ ) and it looks like VDPAU is well liked? AGP, as I understand it,
>> doesn't work with VDPAU, but it looks like BFG makes a PCI card that is
>> compliant, the NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS 512MB PCI. Do you guys think this
>> would be a better choice on this particular system vis-a-vis playing HD or
>> at least SD without hiccups?
>
> I don't think it's so much that VDPAU "doesn't work" with AGP, it's just that
> no VDPAU-cpable cards are available with an AGP interface. I can't think of
> any technical reason it wouldn't work, if you could get such a card.
>
> Remember that VDPAU support is still experimental. You would have to run
> trunk, with all that entails, to use it.
>
> This being your forst foray into Myth, you probably want to stick with the
> released versions.
>
> A PCI video card will work with VDPAU, but again you'd either have to run
> trunk or wait for 0.22. It would allow you to play back HD on your present
> system, I'd wait 'till you get more experience with Myth before trying it.
Jumping in late in the thread, you should consider that anything you buy
should be re-usable if/when you upgrade the motherboard hardware. With
that in mind, and the very real prospect that HD capable nvidia ION
based packages are about to come over the horizon for about $300US, you
should probably limit any purchases at present to hard drives until you
know whether you will go ahead (Because down the road lies a dedicated
mythbox, with a lot more capability than your present box could ever
reach by upgrading, and your present box goes back to being the house
file server!)
Since you won't be doing high def *at present*, your hardware will work
with analog (cable). A 32Gig SSD would make a great OS store. Linux
Mint is based on Fedora so go with mythdora. That way you will not be
lost or stymied by funny little differences.
Create separate partitions for /home, /var and /, so that you can mess
with one without killing data on the others. 'Messing' includes a
complete reinstall! You may want to create a separate partition for
/usr/local, and install myth to /usr/local/bin stc.
For various reasons you should symlink the /var/lib/mysql folder to a
folder on your /home partition. If you get a runaway error which spews
error messages into /var, it will not destroy your mythconverg database
if the partition fills completely. The boot errors which you get in that
case are sufficiently misleading that you can easily and utterrly
destroy any possibility of recovery of anything on the partition. This
is especially soul-destroying if you have installed everything, lock
stock and barrel to one partition, 'a-la-windows'. So, don't DO THAT!
The other drive is the big one, or two for storage...Since mythtv lets
you add storage transparently, the only limit is your drive controller!
As noted, the bottleneck is playback. If you are just playing for now,
then don't bother with expensive upgrades, until you are sure what you
want to do, and where you setup is headed. If you want to add tuners, I
would suggest external or PCI based. For North America I consider the
hdhomerun the cat's meow for Over-The-Air HD. The PVR-500 is great for
analog cable capture. you WILL want 2 tuners for 2 channel capture. I
have 4 tuners, 2 HD and 2 analog, and there are at least a couple of
people with 6. The max I remember being mentioned is 9 but I may be wrong.
Geoff
--
Please let me know if anything I say offends you.
I may wish to offend you again in the future.
Tux says: "Be regular. Eat cron flakes."
More information about the mythtv-users
mailing list