<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Patrick Doyle <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:wpdster@gmail.com">wpdster@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Travis Tabbal <<a href="mailto:travis@tabbal.net">travis@tabbal.net</a>> wrote:<br>
> Looks like it would make a great Myth FE box. Can anyone confirm that HDMI<br>
> audio out works? Without spdif, it becomes important. :) It looks like there<br>
<br>
What is it that makes something "a great Myth FE box", as opposed to "<br>
greate Myth FE/BE box"?<br>
<br>
I am asking, not having looked at the specs for this particular box at<br>
all, so there could be something quite obvious (such as, it's<br>
diskless) that makes my question moot.<br>
<br>
I am about to build a Myth box to replace my antiquated Series 2<br>
(analog) TiVo so that I can record OTA digital broadcasts. If this<br>
box has enough room for a disk or two, wouldn't it make a great FE/BE<br>
box as well? WOOT has supplied me with a USB tuner, so I don't need<br>
any slots. Or am I missing something?<br></blockquote></div><br><br>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. <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>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. <br>