I have a Raspberry Pi (RPi) with 256M Ram (the subsequent model comes with 512M)<br><br>There has been considerable debate about whether this device can act as a mythtv frontend. The various pros, cons and debates seem to be:<br>
<br>1. Generally underpowered;<br><br>2. No hardware MPEG2 decoding (now fixable for a paltry sum);<br><br>3. Very active development of XBMC on it (2 or 3 distros specialising in this);<br><br>4. No mythtv support for OpenMAX video decoding (which is what you need to use to get hardware accelerated video on the RPi), but XBMC supports this; <br>
<br>5. Probably insufficient RAM for most myth themes, so XBMC with the new PVR plugins is possibly a better bet.;<br><br>My situation is mythtv-0.25 backend on an x86 box, 2 HDHR dual tuners recording DVB-T broadcast in h.264 at 1080i and 576i resolutions. (Therefore I don't strictly need the mpeg2 decoder licence for this purpose).<br>
<br>Being a curious soul I installed the latest Raspbmc version a few nights ago and today configured the PVR client for mythtv. I haven't used it extensively but can say this (these points are in no particular order):<br>
<br>1. It works for the most part, but there is clearly not enough RAM and Raspbmc doesn't enable any swap by default. I will enable a swap file when I remember how and see if it makes a difference. Swap will be pretty slow on an SD card though I think. It would be interesting to get my hands on a 512M Rpi for comparison.<br>
<br>2. Deinterlacing is not flash. I believe the raspbmc developer is working on this.<br><br>3. It crashes out of xbmc every now and then, usually when trying to play back a 1080i programme. <br><br>4. Moving around the mythtv pvr plugin screens is painfully slow;<br>
<br>5. I managed to generate fairly reliable crashes by entering the pvr mythtv plugin screens before the plugin had properly initialised (which takes some time and seems to get quite a bit of epg and other info from the backend.<br>
<br>6. Although not directly related to myth, the HDMI-CEC hardware on the RPI seems to work with my panasonic tv and it's remote. Hell the whole Rpi is cheaper than the Pulse Eight HDMI-CEC adaptor! <br><br>7. When it doesn't crash it renders the recorded TV files well enough and without significant breaking of sweat, subject to the need to improve the deinterlacing as mentioned above. <br>
<br>All in all I would have to say "shows promise, needs work".<br><br>I am not trying to start a huge debate or advocate for low power low memory arm frontends to be a universal solution, but there has been regular discussions on here about whether it could work as a frontend, so I wanted to post this report. I would give a qualified "yes". <br>
<br>There has been a convergence here of the maturity of the XBMC PVR addon, the release of MPEG2 decoding licenses by RPi, and the hard work of developers of both mythtv and XBMC.<br><br><br>