[mythtv-users] Minimum hardware requirements for a Frontend

[Wouter Bruggeman]

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 19:50 -0800, R wrote:
> (On the backend, I plan to have multiple tuner cards, 300GB+ SATA hard
> disks, 1.5GB RAM, etc.)
> 
> I need a frontend to mainly view Live TV and recorded shows.
> 
> What would you recommend as the minimum hardware requirements for a
frontend?

The mythfrontend itself doesn't appear to be very resource hungry. That
is, not counting plugins and using a hardware MPEG decoder such as on
the PVR-350 TV-card.

I have been playing around with a GCT Allwell N1030 system. This is
basically a set top box with a Geode 233 MHz (slot 7) processor and 64
MB of memory. The trump-card is a PVR-350 from which only the tv-out
(MPEG 2 decoder) is used. On a standard Fedora Core 4 environment, the
MythTV frontend was installed and configured to use the tv-out.

The result was a working and stable system. Live TV and recorded shows
playback is working fine. There is some minor stuttering while the OSD
fades out and browsing the menu's is a little bit slow. But it is a
working usable system.

While this system does not exactly answer your question (it is a quite
minimal system, but I wouldn't recommend it, compiling mythtv took 2
days), it does show that for just viewing television (not HDTV) the
tv-out decoding is the main bottleneck.

For those interested in the attempts to get MythTV working with the
N1030 set top box can find a discussion here:
http://www.familiebruggeman.nl/~mythtv/smartbox.html

Best regards,
Wouter Bruggeman