[mythtv-users] Initial foray into Mythtv

R. G. Newbury newbury at mandamus.org
Sun May 10 21:44:37 UTC 2009


Brian Wood wrote:
> On Sunday 10 May 2009 13:30:27 Matthew Keefe wrote:
>>>> 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.
>> I've been reading up on this more (as I should have before buying the new
>> card :/ ) and it looks like VDPAU is well liked?  AGP, as I understand it,
>> doesn't work with VDPAU, but it looks like BFG makes a PCI card that is
>> compliant, the NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS 512MB PCI.  Do you guys think this
>> would be a better choice on this particular system vis-a-vis playing HD or
>> at least SD without hiccups?
> 
> I don't think it's so much that VDPAU "doesn't work" with AGP, it's just that 
> no VDPAU-cpable cards are available with an AGP interface. I can't think of 
> any technical reason it wouldn't work, if you could get such a card. 
> 
> Remember that VDPAU support is still experimental. You would have to run 
> trunk, with all that entails, to use it. 
> 
> This being your forst foray into Myth, you probably want to stick with the 
> released versions.
> 
> A PCI video card will work with VDPAU, but again you'd either have to run 
> trunk or wait for 0.22. It would allow you to play back HD on your present 
> system, I'd wait 'till you get more experience with Myth before trying it.


Jumping in late in the thread, you should consider that anything you buy 
should be re-usable if/when you upgrade the motherboard hardware. With 
that in mind, and the very real prospect that HD capable nvidia ION 
based packages are about to come over the horizon for about $300US, you 
should probably limit any purchases at present to hard drives until you 
know whether you will go ahead (Because down the road lies a dedicated 
mythbox, with a lot more capability than your present box could ever 
reach by upgrading, and your present box goes back to being the house 
file server!)

Since you won't be doing high def *at present*, your hardware will work 
with analog  (cable). A 32Gig SSD would make a great OS store. Linux 
Mint is based on Fedora so go with mythdora. That way you will not be 
lost or stymied by funny little differences.

Create separate partitions for /home, /var and /, so that you can mess 
with one without killing data on the others. 'Messing' includes a 
complete reinstall! You may want to create a separate partition for 
/usr/local, and install myth to /usr/local/bin stc.

For various reasons you should symlink the /var/lib/mysql folder to a 
folder on your /home partition. If you get a runaway error which spews 
error messages into /var, it will not destroy your mythconverg database 
if the partition fills completely. The boot errors which you get in that 
case are sufficiently misleading that you can easily and utterrly 
destroy any possibility of recovery of anything on the partition. This 
is especially soul-destroying if you have installed everything, lock 
stock and barrel to one partition, 'a-la-windows'.  So, don't DO THAT!


The other drive is the big one, or two for storage...Since mythtv lets 
you add storage transparently, the only limit is your drive controller!

As noted, the bottleneck is playback. If you are just playing for now, 
then don't bother with expensive upgrades, until you are sure what you 
want to do, and where you setup is headed. If you want to add tuners, I 
would suggest external or PCI based. For North America I consider the 
hdhomerun the cat's meow for Over-The-Air HD. The PVR-500 is great for 
analog cable capture. you WILL want 2 tuners for 2 channel capture. I 
have 4 tuners, 2 HD and 2 analog, and there are at least a couple of 
people with 6. The max I remember being mentioned is 9 but I may be wrong.

Geoff





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