[mythtv-users] Taking the MythTV plunge

[Stephen Tait]

At 11:35 05/05/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi All,
>
>I'm about to take the MythTV plunge. Current plan is to use a MSI Mega PC 
>180 w/ a AMD 3K XP processor, 1G Ram and 120G hard disk local to the PC. 
>Additional storage will be provided by a file server.
>
>Satellite board is the SkyStar 2 DVB board. Initially I'm going to use the 
>on-board nForce2 for TV out - but will probably migrate to a proper Video 
>card with hardware MPEG 2 in the future.
>
>Any comments on the hardware? Anything you'd do differently?

Firstly, I wouldn't use such a huge CPU. I had a far-too-powerful Athlon 
2400 knocking about. Watching TV and DVD's uses a gand total of 0.0% of CPU 
due to accelerated MPEG2 playback in my GFX card. It's only playing MPEG4's 
that push the load above 30%. This machine is also used as a render node, 
so the CPU isn't wasted at any rate.
More than 120GB would be more befitting for this box if that's all it has, 
if you're recording to a remote server get 2 40/60/80GB and RAID0 them 
(either Linux software RAID or one of the excellent 3ware cards). This will 
make even more sense if you start chucking more than one capture card in 
there, since your HD traffic will rocket through the roof. RAID0 will give 
you much higher disc performance and give you more space for your LiveTV 
buffer. Bear in mind that RAID0 makes your data vulnerable - failure of a 
single hard drive will trash it all.
I've not tried a DVB card yet - I have one lying about (Nova-T) which I 
couldn't get to work (even in Windows) in my last house due to a duff 
"shared" aerial which trashed the DVB signal
Make sure you get a decent soundcard with hardware mixing - as far as I 
know, the Audigy's are the only ones which qualify.

I recommend the remote server route - I have a whopping great 4U with 
approx. 500GB of RAID1 (3ware) storage on it. Not surprisingly, it makes a 
racket, but then it lives under the stairs. All of the other computers 
(r)sync offof it either by SSH tunnels or Samba domain logon, and 
everything works a treat. It's got a colossal uptime despite the fact I 
keep putting new hard drives in it (SATA hot swap :^).


>Which distro do people recommend? I've got a fair bit of experience as far 
>as Linux goes - but most of it is in the embedded space.

As far as bleeding-edge stuff goes, Gentoo (which is what I use, since it 
can easily be made super-lean) or Debian unstable are the best IMO. Easy to 
update and with an utter shedload of preconfigured packages. From the lists 
it seems that most of the devs use Debian, so any problems you have with 
that should be well documented. And with Debian you don't have to wait 
around for hours waiting for it to compile. My 2400 takes about 5 hours to 
go from reformatting to a running system, then another 5 hours for XFree 
and QT and all the other stuff. Never used Debian unstable, so I don't know 
how well the install will handle the nForce - Gentoo has very good support 
for this at install time though.


>What are the trade offs as far as MythTV goes?

Well, the only trouble I've had so far seems to be issues regarding 
grabbing channel data, which I have only just got to work, I just have a 
few issues with the channel changing to sort out. These problems seem 
restricted to European users through, and are probably irrelevant to DVB-T 
users. Be prepared to do a lot of tinkering though, from what I read about 
DVB-T cards they're a bit of a struggle (somewhat akin to the excellent 
PVR-250 card I have).

I'm going to stop now I only joined this list yesterday, and already I've 
written too much.


>Thanks,
>
>
>Roman
>
>
>
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