[mythtv-users] Need OS and hardware insight...

[Tim Cyr]

First off, yes I'm a newb and I've looked through the archive, but I 
couldn't find what I needed...

Specifically I would like to find out if MythTV would run better under QNX 
or Knoppix? The only thing I saw in the archive for QNX was over a year old 
and didn't give any specifics anyway. I am considering using this because 
it's small and targeted specifically for embedded systems, boots FAST, the 
overlay file system seems to be better suited to the application, and it's 
easier to install and configure. Worst case if QNX won't work then I know 
the EFF help pages are based on a version of Knoppix targeted specifically 
toward MythTV. I don't want to use the full blown versions of RH or Mandrake 
which I saw were typically referred to in the archive because they are too 
big and boot too slow (I do prefer RH for my desktop Alpha box though...)

Also, in my browsing of the archive I noticed that the Connexant chip was 
recommended against because of lack of drivers. As fate would have it this 
is exactly the chip that I bought because it's the only one that I saw that 
had native MPEG-4 support. But, the thread that mentioned it was at least
a year old, so are there drivers now available for this chip?

Also, a word of caution for Epia users, the 6000 sucks. It's way too lacking 
in performance (at least for what I wanted it to do), and I had problems with 
the video interface (doesn't enable TV output during boot, so you need to 
connect the VGA output for debug and loading software). I went with an ASUS 
X-series instead with an inexpensive Minuet case I got from Mwave.com (not 
the smallest, but not much bigger than my VCR / ReplayTV / DirecTivo either). 
For video I'm using an ATI Radeon 9200SE/128MB, and an AirLink TV capture card 
(partly because everything is low profile, but also because the AirLink has a 
built-in IR remote control; and even though the motherboard has built-in video 
it doesn't have TV out or DVD decoding in hardware -- I'm trying to use as much

HW assist as possible in order to free up the CPU to perform other tasks like 
editing and burning to DVD while recording). This motherboard also has the 
benefit of dual-channel memory and built-in Firewire and 6 channel audio with 
S/PDIF. If anyone has any success or failure stories related to the above HW
please share.

Thanks much,
TC