[mythtv-users] Advice on making a convergence box

Kichigai Mentat kichigai at comcast.net
Sat Mar 11 22:34:13 UTC 2006


Hi. I've been using MythTV for a few months now, and I'm very  
impressed with it. My family is slowly starting to catch on to the  
glories of time-shifting, but some are still rather stubborn. My  
current set-up is with a Celeron 600 as a back-end with 256 MB of RAM  
and a Hauppauge PVR-150 encoder. I use an XBox as a front-end. I'm  
using MythTV 0.18.1 at the moment, and I plan to upgrade to 0.19 once  
some of the kinks are worked out.

My problem is that I'm going to be going away to college this fall.  
No one in my family has a lot of technical expertise, so I need to  
simplify things. In other words, I want to keep the current MythTV  
set-up the same. I am planning to take my web-server/router box with  
me to school, and I'm wondering if I can augment its purpose.

Right now, it serves as an Apache, FTP, and IRC server. Usually the  
heaviest load the thing pulls is the IRC server. I'm wondering if,  
using a hardware MPEG encoder, like a PVR-150 (I'm thinking of a  
PVR-500 too), I could also have it serve as a MythTV back-end.

The CPU is a Pentium II (Deschutes) at 348.491 MHz. Linux claims it  
runs at 694.68 Bogomips (doubt that'll be a useful number for you  
guys). It has an FPU, VME, DE, PSE, TSC, MSR, PAE, MCE, CX8, APIC,  
SEP, MTRR, PGE, MCA, CMOV, PAT, PSE36, FXSR, and MMX support, and a  
512 KB cache.

Given a large RAM and hard disk upgrade, could the machine support  
this kind of job? For now, I'm thinking of buying a second XBox and  
using that as a front-end. But as long as we're on the topic of  
hypothetical system configurations, if I were to outfit the system  
with a new GPU (The computer uses AGP by the looks of it, just not  
sure which generation) capable of XVMC, could it also serve as a  
front-end? I mean running at 640x480 (I'm not going High-Def yet),  
and outputting to a TV. I'd prefer to have some deinterlacing going  
on (It's really noticeable in some recordings), and does this seem  
feasible (I forgot if XVMC does deinterlacing)?

Thanks for all your help.

Duct Tape Tip No. 130:
     Cat underfoot? Tape it to the ceiling.
Duct Tape Tip No. 131:
     Dog underfoot? Tape it to the ceiling.
Duct Tape Tip No. 132:
     Kids underfoot?
     --The Duct Tape Book by Jim and Tim

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