[mythtv-users] Barebone myth tv nodes?

Jack Trout witmore1 at gmail.com
Sat Aug 20 07:30:58 UTC 2005


On 8/20/05, Robert Denier <denier at umr.edu> wrote:
> Has anyone seen or figured out the lowest cost way to get a bare mythtv
> node up?  I was thinking of setting up myth around the house and what
> I'm looking for is something like
> 
> 1.5GHZ + cpu
> Integrated sound
> Integrated video with tv out on motherboard
> Integrated network
> 
> All of the previous need to work with myth obviously, including doing
> NFS booting via the network.
> 
> In a perfect world it would be a tiny case as well, but somehow I
> suspect to get all these things the price might get more expensive.
> 
> A shuttle or Asus Pundit might be possibilities, but both were more
> expensive than what I had in mind.  If anyone sees some refurbished
> motherboards that are decent that might be idea.  The sticking points
> seem to be getting the tv-out to work as well as the nfs booting off the
> network.
> 
> -Robert
> 

Well Robert, I was tired of sitting in the basement to watch all my
recorded shows and such, so I built an inexpensive frontend only
system. now its not yet as quiet as I like, I am still contemplating
how I am going to fix that either make the system diskless, or just
find a quiet hard drive. Heres what I have done and my costs,

I did blow money on an ebay auction for a processor, I tried using the
livecd Knoppmyth for a frontend, and it didnt seem up to speed, and
have tried on my laptop which is a p3 850 with 512mb ram, and it wasnt
either, so I started bidding on ebay, when I thought that I might have
better luck just installing fedoracore on it, and running it from the
hard drive instead of the cd, might improve my chances, but the bid I
placed on ebay didnt get outbid before I figured out that with the
733, I could play divx movies, and live and recorded tv encoded from
pvr250s I hope that down the line when I start playing with mame and
the like, the extra 266mhz will help in some way.. I recently got my
remote setup, and the wife is watching movies on it as I speak,

and I was worried about tvout, especially as this machine only has
PCI, which I also didnt think about during the purchasing process,
especially because I already had a fanless GF4 ti4200 AGP, but the
very nice thing is with the 7124 nVidia drivers and this MX4000 TVout 
was as simple as making the svideo/composite the only connected
monitor adapter.

Dell GX110 Small form factor
733mhz p3 (upgraded to p3 1ghz)
128megs pc133
10gig hard drive
floppy
cdrom
onboard nic
2x pci slots
onboard video (intel 810)
	
	Cost...... 89.99 
		+   6.62 Tax
		+  16.00 2x8$ computer show admission
		= 112.61 Total cost of aquistion

nVidia GF MX4000 PCI New from Newegg 
	Cost + S/H 35.99

Intel Pentium 3 1ghz processor Used from Ebay
	Cost + S/H 30.50

ATI Remote Wonder RF w/reciever USB
	Cost + S/H 30.50

Current running cost 209.6

Parts Used from scrap pile in house

Generic Stick of PC133 Ram
CMedia Sound Card (the system I bought without checking, did not have
onboard sound installed, this card has spid/f out anyway, although not
enabled as of yet)
KeyBoard and Mouse
regular DVD Rom *
Fedora Core 3 dvd **

(* the small form factor case use all normal componets except for a
modified laptop style optical drive, so during OS Install the case was
left open to use a desktop dvdrom because I hate switching disks
during an OS install, and I already had a burned copy of FC3 on DVD)
(** this DVD was downloaded legally from the Fedora Core community
using Bittorrent. Fedora Core was chosen for 2 reasons, My previous
familiarity of RedHat, and Jarod Wilsons and AxelThimms excellent
instructions and binary support of that platform)


Parts not required to complete but to look nice
Small form factor PS/2 or USB Keyboard preferably with intergrated
pointing device for troubleshooting and web browsing
(currently using full sized black keyboard, and a laptop mini ps2 trackball)

small under shelf/desk keyboard tray to conceal connected keyboard


YMMV


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