[mythtv-users] ION "LE" suitable for VDPAU ?

[Travis Tabbal]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Patrick Doyle <wpdster at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Travis Tabbal <travis at tabbal.net> wrote:
> > Looks like it would make a great Myth FE box. Can anyone confirm that
> HDMI
> > audio out works? Without spdif, it becomes important. :) It looks like
> there
>
> What is it that makes something "a great Myth FE box", as opposed to "
> greate Myth FE/BE box"?
>
> I am asking, not having looked at the specs for this particular box at
> all, so there could be something quite obvious (such as, it's
> diskless) that makes my question moot.
>
> I am about to build a Myth box to replace my antiquated Series 2
> (analog) TiVo so that I can record OTA digital broadcasts.  If this
> box has enough room for a disk or two, wouldn't it make a great FE/BE
> box as well?  WOOT has supplied me with a USB tuner, so I don't need
> any slots.  Or am I missing something?
>


I like it as an FE because it's tiny and quiet. The HD in this thing is a
small laptop drive. 160GB if I remember right. It's probably too small to be
a combined FE/BE box unless you are OK with external HDDs. It does have
eSATA and USB to connect drives up with, so if you don't mind that, it would
probably work for you. It's CPU is also a bit on the slow side, so things
like commercial flagging, transcoding, etc. will probably be slow. The MySQL
stuff might cause issues as well on a slower box like this. IMO, don't use
it for a combined FE/BE. I think you will be disappointed with the overall
Myth experience with this machine in a combined role. For running both on
the same box, I would suggest a micro-ATX machine in a compact case with a
couple drives. I found that I/O for the database caused slight problems
sometimes when I shared the recordings and OS on the same drive. Adding an
old PATA drive (from my old TiVo) for boot/database and keeping the faster,
larger SATA drive for recordings helped a lot. An SSD for the boot/database
drive would also work well, but they are significantly more expensive.

My combined box was a micro-ATX based machine with an Athlon 64 X2 3800+. It
worked quite well with the exception of the database I/O causing slight
stuttering in the recordings once in a while. Adding the extra drive fixed
that problem. My smaller micro-ATX case is a little bigger than my old S2
TiVo box, so it's not too big. The Revo we are talking about here is a tiny
Atom based nettop computer. Very small, no real room for expansion in the
case.

I've since moved my backend onto a large server running in a VM. It's
working very well. My Frontends are now very overpowered with VDPAU decoding
the video.
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