[mythtv-users] Solar PC

[KMF]

Howdy!

On Sun, 2005-04-10 at 10:12, David Kyle wrote:
> Are you using the 2U case (w/ optical drive bay and 3PCI slots)?  Or
> the small 1U?

  The SolarPC cases have changed a little bit since I bought 
 my system. My case is most similar to their current 2U. My
 V10K has a single PCI slot with a dual PCI riser card.

> Is the fan quiet enough to leave running constantly next to your TV? 
> That's my only concern with using the V10k, since it seems to need a
> fan.

  I'm running the case fan at half speed and the CPU fan at reduced
 voltage. It runs *very* quietly and sits beneath a TV. If the house
 is dead quiet and the refrigerator and HVAC fan are not running
 I can barely hear it. I'm very pleased with how quietly it
 runs. 

   Of course, with the PVR350 I generally use very little CPU
 power so we're usually producing very little heat so we've 
 gotten away with slowing down the fans. (The PVR produces
 heat but the way the box is set up the case fan blows directly
 across it)

> Do you use the PVR-350's tv-out?  Are you able to have the GUI running
> on that?  I've seen conflicting information as to if that is possible.

   Yes, the GUI runs just fine on the PVR350 TVout. It's been
 pretty reliable with the longest uptime being 2 months. With
 my current upgrade to a 2.6 kernel and the latest ivtv-0.2rc3
 series of drivers the uptime hasn't been as good but it's
 still pretty decent (on the order of weeks). If I could
 figure out how to reset the decoder on the PVR350 when
 it gets hung up without crashing the box the uptime
 would be back to months. 
 

> What kind of CPU usage do you get with Live TV?

  Well, the PVR350 is doing everything so it is some absurdly 
 small fraction of the CPU. Truthfully, we almost never
 watch LiveTV as there's usually some recording to watch 
 which has commercials marked, etc... 


>   Do you think a a 533/600/800 MHz fanless processor would be powerful
> enough? 

  That depends on what you want to do. If all you are doing is
 recording with a PVR350 and playing back those recordings then
 one of the fanless processors would probably be fine. However,
 if you want to mess with DVDs or play videos other than fairly simple
 MPEGs you're probably going to be disappointed. The V10K seems
 to nearly be able to handle DVDs but it's still too jerky to
 bother with. (We've got a DVD player so we don't care that much)
 Playing Windows Media files with mplayer works but is very
 sloooooooow however most MPEG files work OK. 

    So, the little SolarPC EPIA setup is not for everybody. In
 addition to the CPU limitations, if you wanted to run multiple
 disk drives there would be power supply limitations. However,
 for us it has turned out to be just about perfect. We wanted
 something quiet and low power that's used almost exclusively
 for recording and playback with Myth. We didn't want any other
 computer to be on 24/7 so we wanted it for both backend/frontend
 duties. 

    Good Luck!

-- 
   Kevin Flaherty
   katoom at pacbell.net