[mythtv-users] PCI-E Analog Card

[Brian Wood]

On Friday 22 January 2010 04:33:09 pm Mark wrote:

> Wow, that's gonna be a busy system.  If you truly need 10 analog
> concurrent channels, go PVR-500's on a motherboard with 5 pci slots.
> I'm not sure how many concurrent streams you can get over 133 Mbits
> though.  Probably you'll be fine.

You'll want to make disk I/O doesn't become a bottleneck. Certainly don't try 
to use USB-connected drives. USB may theoretically be able to handle the speed 
required, but USB systems somehow never live up to their performance claims.

You'll want fast drives, and you may consider a RAID system that will increase 
performance (RAID0 or a variant thereof that spreads the R/W load over several 
drives). 

I'd go with a server class motherboard for a system like you describe, or even 
multiple systems capturing 5 channels per machine.

An older SCSI-based server might work for you, they can be had relatively 
cheaply these days (at least compared to their original cost). SCSI drives are 
also available cheaply, but large capacity SCSI drives are expensive. You 
might look into SAS as well.

Don't try to cheap out, a system like you want will have to perform very well, 
and you generally have to pay for that. Disk I/O will be more important than 
CPU power, and that's usually found in server machines.