<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV>Hi. I've been using MythTV for a few months now, and I'm very impressed with it. My family is slowly starting to catch on to the glories of time-shifting, but some are still rather stubborn. My current set-up is with a Celeron 600 as a back-end with 256 MB of RAM and a Hauppauge PVR-150 encoder. I use an XBox as a front-end. I'm using MythTV 0.18.1 at the moment, and I plan to upgrade to 0.19 once some of the kinks are worked out.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>My problem is that I'm going to be going away to college this fall. No one in my family has a lot of technical expertise, so I need to simplify things. In other words, I want to keep the current MythTV set-up the same. I am planning to take my web-server/router box with me to school, and I'm wondering if I can augment its purpose.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Right now, it serves as an Apache, FTP, and IRC server. Usually the heaviest load the thing pulls is the IRC server. I'm wondering if, using a hardware MPEG encoder, like a PVR-150 (I'm thinking of a PVR-500 too), I could also have it serve as a MythTV back-end.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The CPU is a Pentium II (Deschutes) at 348.491 MHz. Linux claims it runs at 694.68 Bogomips (doubt that'll be a useful number for you guys). It has an FPU, VME, DE, PSE, TSC, MSR, PAE, MCE, CX8, APIC, SEP, MTRR, PGE, MCA, CMOV, PAT, PSE36, FXSR, and MMX support, and a 512 KB cache.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Given a large RAM and hard disk upgrade, could the machine support this kind of job? For now, I'm thinking of buying a second XBox and using that as a front-end. But as long as we're on the topic of hypothetical system configurations, if I were to outfit the system with a new GPU (The computer uses AGP by the looks of it, just not sure which generation) capable of XVMC, could it also serve as a front-end? I mean running at 640x480 (I'm not going High-Def yet), and outputting to a TV. I'd prefer to have some deinterlacing going on (It's really noticeable in some recordings), and does this seem feasible (I forgot if XVMC does deinterlacing)?</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Thanks for all your help.</DIV><BR><DIV> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><U><I>Duct Tape Tip No. 130:</I></U></FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><I><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"><SPAN class="Apple-converted-tab"> </SPAN></SPAN>Cat underfoot? Tape it to the ceiling.</I></FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><U><I>Duct Tape Tip No. 131:</I></U></FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><I><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"><SPAN class="Apple-converted-tab"> </SPAN></SPAN>Dog underfoot? Tape it to the ceiling.</I></FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><U><I>Duct Tape Tip No. 132:</I></U></FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><I><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"><SPAN class="Apple-converted-tab"> </SPAN></SPAN>Kids underfoot?</I></FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"><SPAN class="Apple-converted-tab"> </SPAN></SPAN>--<I>The Duct Tape Book</I></FONT><FONT face="Lucida Grande" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Lucida Grande"> by Jim and Tim</FONT></P> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>