[mythtv-users] Cheap and quiet hardware for SD MythTV - possible?

[Jim Stichnoth]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:10 PM, Robert McNamara
<robert.mcnamara at gmail.com>wrote:

> The ION Boards are being hotly anticipated as frontends, but I would
> never want to run a combined frontend/backend on them-- It will do
> everything you need a backend to do... eventually.  I have become so
> accustomed to things like realtime commercial flagging, huge DB
> lookups, etc. that I wouldn't want to delve into ION land for a
> combined system.  You can probably find a nice ION frontend for a few
> hundred pounds, but you are still going to need to find a reliable
> backend, some tuner cards, and disk space for your recordings.  In
> short, I think <200 Pounds for a *full* myth system will be
> sacrificing too much performance to make it worthwhile.
>

I wouldn't underestimate the power of the Atom processor.  Although I
haven't done any formal performance comparisons, I found that the Atom
performs comparably to the 2.8GHz P4 system that I occasionally do test
installs on.  Plenty of people use systems like the P4 for their backend and
are quite happy.  I even have my two Zotac IONITX "C" machines running
mythjobqueue for commflagging.  They can commflag a 720p or 1080i ATSC
recording at about 80% realtime speed -- e.g., a 60-minute program may take
75 minutes to commflag.  (It's not so nice for max bitrate 720p HD-PVR
recordings, where it runs at about 40% realtime speed.)  Regarding huge DB
lookups, I find that to be disk-bound rather than CPU-bound.

In my opinion, the biggest problems with the ION as a combined BE/FE are the
physical factors.  You get an ION because you want a small, quiet, low-power
box.  Adding hard drives and tuners works against that, and pretty soon
you're better off with a "traditional" build.

Jim
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