that does sound like a good idea. Thanks for the advice. I am thinking that I might get a tower case and throw in a blazing chip and a gig or two of RAM and one of my existing hdd's and my pvr-250 and ... aww hell... I might as well just save up about one or two paychecks worth and just get everything at once... I hate to have a half-finished system and I don't want to take my current dvd-player with me when I get a new place. oh well... I like your idea and I will end up doing something like that.
<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/31/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Dewey Smolka</b> <<a href="mailto:dsmolka@gmail.com">dsmolka@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On 3/31/06, Timothy Waters <<a href="mailto:timothy.waters@gmail.com">timothy.waters@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> How about smallish, easier to get working, but don't worry about the cost. I<br>> was thinking about maybe a shuttle case or something along those lines. I'll
<br>> be buying this probably one or two pieces at a time so cost isn't my<br>> concern. I want it HDTV ready as well. Thoughts?<br>><br><br>Based on the ideas that 1) cost is not really an issue; and 2) you'll<br>
be building piece by piece, here's what I'd recommend:<br><br>Start with a combined FE/BE in a mid-tower or tower case. This is<br>mainly because you'll want the room for expansion devices and drives,<br>and you'll want to leave enough space for airflow. Start with an SD
<br>setup using Hauppage PVRx50 card(s) -- much simpler to get going (plus<br>most programming is still SD-only anyway).<br><br>Although you won't be doing HD yet and the horsepower requirements of<br>this kind of system are quite modest, make sure you have a strong
<br>processor -- it will certainly help with transcoding and com flagging.<br>Once it's running well, then expand to HD and XvMC.<br><br>This is where the big case becomes important -- you can record SD with<br>good quality at 1-2 GB/hour, but HD will need at least 7-8 GB/hour.
<br>You'll eventually want to fill up that tower with big drives, LVMed<br>and RAIDed, especially if you plan on recording a lot of HD content.<br>Plus you'll want all your tuner cards in this machine.<br><br>Once you're happy with how that's working out, you'll want to build
<br>your beautiful, small, quiet frontend. This will also need quite a<br>beefy processor to handle HD, but you only need a small disk for OS,<br>or run in diskless with network boot.<br><br>At this point you can take your tower with all the drives and put it
<br>somwhere that all the wires (not to mention drive whirring and fan<br>humming) won't bother anyone.<br><br>All in all, this type of setup will not be cheap, but the expense will<br>be spread out over a long time. It will also allow you to get up and
<br>running quickly, cheaply, and (relatively) easily.<br><br>Just my $0.02.<br>_______________________________________________<br>mythtv-users mailing list<br><a href="mailto:mythtv-users@mythtv.org">mythtv-users@mythtv.org
</a><br><a href="http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users">http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Timothy Waters<br><a href="mailto:timothy.waters@gmail.com">
timothy.waters@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://www.e-Waters.org">http://www.e-Waters.org</a><br>205-587-9001<br><br>"It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man." Albert Einstein(1946)