[mythtv-users] Advice on cheap boxes for front-ends only

[Stephen Tait]

At 10:26 06/07/2004 -0300, you wrote:
>I am looking at setting up a home-lan myth setup, where al l my equipment for
>recieving signals ( sat dish boxes, cable boxes, encoder boxes ) will be in a
>closet in the basement, and I will have a small, cheap, low power front end
>box at every TV. This way I can capitalize on myth's backend / frontend
>functionality.

When you say "low power", are we talking MPEG2 low power, or MPEG4 low 
power? Most o' those funky EPIA boards will handle MPEG2 fine, but will 
thrash on some MPEG4. Some of the newer boards are fine with MPEG4, at the 
expense of some noise and heat.


>I was wondering what people have for advice for a low cost front end only 
>box.
>So far my prime candidate has been a suitably modded XBox, which seems to be
>cheaper than most other solutions I have been pursuing ( including building
>my own microATX based box ).

Of course, the Xbox is subsidised hardware, but then you won't be able to 
add any PCI cards or grooviness like that; presumably you can add-on USB 
peripherals.

mATX is by far the most flexible (and my own personal favourite), but also 
quite expensive if you just want to watch TV on it. mini-ITX can be 
sorta-expensive (WRT the cass, slimline DVD drives, low profile RAM, etc), 
but then you're paying for the form factor, not the power.

One thing that should be a must for you: get network boot working. This 
means you don't need hard drives in the frontends (less noise, heat, power 
and maintenance) and can consolidate them all on the backend which (if it 
has all the TV cards in it) is gonna need them! I imagine all your 
frontends are gonna be pretty much identical, so you can have a sole boot 
image for multiple machines.