[mythtv-users] Using Macs as Front/Back-End

[Brian Edmonds]

On 8/25/06, Taylan Pince <taylan at taylanpince.com> wrote:
> That sounds promising. I did some research about the Plextor PX-TV402U-NA
> ConvertX, it seems like it could do the job for both handling the cable tv
> signal and encoding the stream (expensive though, $225 CAD here). I might
> buy this and the solo core mac mini to prepare a test setup.

I've been using a PPC Mac Mini running Debian as both front and
backend since last November.  It works great.  The only significant
issue has been a longstanding endian bug in the MP3 encoding, for
which a patch was posted at the start of August.  Before that I had to
record raw audio, which worked, but roughly doubled recording sizes.

Note that you'll almost certainly want to upgrade the RAM in the box.
It works with the original 256MB, but it's really doggy.  With 1GB
it's just fine.  I also offload the commercial flagging to my x86
fileserver (an old 533MHz Celeron).  We also use a couple x86 laptops
as frontends (over 802.11g), and the whole setup is just great.  Oh,
and I also like to transcode shows (on one of the fast laptops) to
watch on my Treo 650 with TCPMP, and that also works nicely.

> I would also like to keep Mac OS X on
> the machine in case I need it.

No idea there.  I wiped OSX from the disk without even booting it
once, and haven't missed it.

Brian.