[mythtv-users] Which USB DVB-T Device should I choose, in a 266Mhz Linux Box

[Sarah Hayes]

Guan Xuefei wrote:
> Hello folks, I am new to MythTV, I have a old linux box (266MHz CPU), 
> I would like to choose a USB DVB-T box, and It should have the 
> hardware encoder because the poor CPU, I checked the mythtv website, 
> and it takes me to here, 
> http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-T_USB_Devices, a lot of 
> devices for me to choose, If anyone have ever use those devices, 
> please give me some advices. Thanks.
>
> Guan,
Whilst, yes, DVB cards require very little to no CPU overhead, I'd be 
dubious of using a USB one on such a beastie.

  A lot of them I've encountered seem to be USB2 not USB1 or 1.1 (and 
yes, I've encountered old boards that were pre-usb spec with what 
amounts to the USB equivalent of early pre-N on them... i.e. nowt worked 
properly with anyone else's stuff), backwards compatibility is one thing 
but volume of data another.  I'm also dubious because USB devices do 
seem to take a hit on the CPU and well, you'll have the data stream 
being written to the disk; can it cope?

A good question to ask is "How much throughput does a disk need to write 
an mpeg2/whatever it appears as stream?" and compare the average against 
a hdparm -tT /dev/hda if the result is higher you're ok, if not, you'll 
possibly be dropping frames on recording.

Is this little machine going to be an "all-in-one"?  If so keep in mind 
that MySQL will be running on it and both the frontend and backend 
programs, so you might want to max the memory on the system; which is 
probably PC100/133 SDRAM and thus dirt cheap.  Being an older board it 
probably won't take all that much so not an expensive proposition :)

Would it work?  Probably.  Would it be a good long term solution? 
Probably not, but handy for figuring out if MythTV is for you and then 
throwing bigger (but not necessarily cutting edge) hardware at it, say a 
PIII or early P4 for both recording and perfect playback :)

Sarah