[mythtv-users] living room myth pvr

[Dewey Smolka]

On 3/31/06, Timothy Waters <timothy.waters at gmail.com> wrote:
> How about smallish, easier to get working, but don't worry about the cost. I
> was thinking about maybe a shuttle case or something along those lines. I'll
> be buying this probably one or two pieces at a time so cost isn't my
> concern. I want it HDTV ready as well. Thoughts?
>

Based on the ideas that 1) cost is not really an issue; and 2) you'll
be building piece by piece, here's what I'd recommend:

Start with a combined FE/BE in a mid-tower or tower case. This is
mainly because you'll want the room for expansion devices and drives,
and you'll want to leave enough space for airflow. Start with an SD
setup using Hauppage PVRx50 card(s) -- much simpler to get going (plus
most programming is still SD-only anyway).

Although you won't be doing HD yet and the horsepower requirements of
this kind of system are quite modest, make sure you have a strong
processor -- it will certainly help with transcoding and com flagging.
Once it's running well, then expand to HD and XvMC.

This is where the big case becomes important -- you can record SD with
good quality at 1-2 GB/hour, but HD will need at least 7-8 GB/hour.
You'll eventually want to fill up that tower with big drives, LVMed
and RAIDed, especially if you plan on recording a lot of HD content.
Plus you'll want all your tuner cards in this machine.

Once you're happy with how that's working out, you'll want to build
your beautiful, small, quiet frontend. This will also need quite a
beefy processor to handle HD, but you only need a small disk for OS,
or run in diskless with network boot.

At this point you can take your tower with all the drives and put it
somwhere that all the wires (not to mention drive whirring and fan
humming) won't bother anyone.

All in all, this type of setup will not be cheap, but the expense will
be spread out over a long time. It will also allow you to get up and
running quickly, cheaply, and (relatively) easily.

Just my $0.02.