[mythtv-users] Initial foray into Mythtv

[Brian Wood]

On Sunday 10 May 2009 11:45:01 Matthew Keefe wrote:

>
> I hope to capture mostly SD content I believe, though the ability to
> capture HD would not be frowned upon :)

Capturing already digitized material requires little CPU, just disk I/O. The 
hardware you describe should be able to play back SD, but probably NOT HD. 
You might even need XvMC for SD playback, a 1.8 Ghz. single-core CPU is 
pretty slow by modern standards.

So that hardware would certainly work as a B/E, probably not as a F/E if you 
want to watch HD. I don't think you can get a VDPAU-capable graphics card 
with an AGP interface.

The pre-built distros are nice to get started with. Even if you plan to 
compile yourself eventually, it gets you familiar with how a Myth system 
works, how to set it up etc. As to which one to use, you probably want one 
that's based on whatever Linux distro you are already famliar with (MythDora 
is FC-based, Mythbuntu is, obviously, Ubuntu-based).

You will need some significant capacity to store recordings, an SSD with 
sufficient capacity would be prohibitively expensive, and the SSDs are not 
faster than regular HDDs. You do want to try and have your MySQL database on 
a separate spindle from your recordings.

The Rambus RAM is certainly expensive, you may eventually want to replace the 
hardware, but it will certainly work as a backend, if you don't need really 
fast transcodes or commflagging. The real question with a B/E is disk IO 
capability. You can, of course, go with RAID0 to increase disk performance.

RDRAM also runs hot and draws a lot of current, and I think you are limited to 
256 or 512 sticks, nothing bigger.

Have fun.

-- 
beww
beww at beww.org