[mythtv-users] Lower power usage ideas? (for backend)

Justin Hunt beyonddeath at gmail.com
Tue Mar 15 04:33:38 UTC 2005


My solution may not be as effective as what you want todo, however im
going to be moving from unlimited electricity to metered electricity
in the summer and my plan to lower electrical costs is to first
eliminate my server/backend computer and merge it with my desktop (a
dual opteron 242 system), then have it use power now (havnt looked if
this works in linux yet, heres hoping) and set it up to turn hd's off
after only a couple minutes of inactivity and power the screen down.

I know that many bios's allow you to specify the computer turn on at a
certain time, with varying degrees of configureability, from hour x
every day to picking days and such.  after you figure that you its
trivial to have the computer shut itself down.  (cron) you can also
have mythtv not run commercial flagging and just use cron to schedule
it to run as you please, then have it shut the pc down ie this script:
#!/bin/bash 
mythcommflag
shutdown -h now 
(i dont remember if that shutdown command will power off or just leave
it sitting at turn off pc now)

Your idea of using a pentium M is a good idea, my laptop draws about
25 watts max with a lcd screen (1.4ghz) and if you clock it down it
drops to about 15ish, although the a/c adaptor draws quite a big load
to charge at about 40watts (says 1.5 amps at 120v) but if u used a
laptop based on p-M you wouldnt need to have continuous power to run
it, and if u get a system with decent sized battery can run for 10
hours on a charge the ibm t40 (i think) does this nicely, i wouldnt
recommend the dell inspiron 600m for battery life i have 3 batteries
(1 main and 2 cdrom) and i can get about 5 hours out of it on a good
day.

Hopefully that helps a bit?
Justin


On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:19:07, colliepon <colliepon at webport.veris.org> wrote:
> Just curious both what other people are doing, and feature discussion (not b*tching :) on other methods of reducing the power use of a myth box since it can build up over awhile. (and my next move may very well be off grid - satellite TV, running off solar or wind, so power use is critical but i'd prefer an alternative to the VCR) A few examples i'm thinking of:
> 
> Could you schedule an expected time-on and time off to work with a normal block of programming?  By shut down time I mean to properly suspend all tasks like commercial flagging without screwing up data or not doing them during the week at all.  This would let you use a standard analog or digital wall timer to turn on the computer and satellite receiver for a given block of time (for instance 6:30pm to 10pm if you mostly like the evening block, or 11pm to about 3am if you like Adult Swim) since I don't know any other way to tell a computer to turn on at a given time.  :) (though if someone knows of a computer-programmable wakeup solution please tell me!)
> 
> Or perhaps having a C3 machine with a PVR500 for 24hr recording which can wake up a P4 with another card for overflow during peak hours, and also to do things like commercial flagging or recompression. (which also might need to schedule file moves, for instance a 120gig drive on the C3 and 500gig on the P4 as primary storage)
> 
> Or maybe speed throttling certain cpu's might work - some of the new Centrino motherboards for desktop use http://www17.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20041224/index.html, laptops with a USB grabber, or even the underclocked Athlon XP http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041001/index.html - does anyone use anything like this? (or have any experience/insights worth sharing?)  I've no clue how/if throttling is supported in linux, or mythTV or anything else, but it would be nice to let the cpu idle during daily recording and to speed up for flagging and transcoding.
> 
> Is anyone else using a lower power design or strategy with Myth?
> 
> 
> Colliepon
> 
> 
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> 
> 


-- 
Justin Hunt
beyonddeath at gmail.com
http://bd.a.la
Home: 416-926-1664 x 4238
Cell:  416-779-1201


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