[mythtv-users] Hardware recommendation for mythtv?

[Travis Tabbal]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 7:03 AM, Christian <CvB at kruemel.org> wrote:
> I'm currently planning to replace my DVB-S receiver with a mythtv box, and
> would be glad if anybody had a few comments on my plans.
>
> In terms of hardware, I am looking to get a Zotac ION MiniITX A-E Atom 330
> DualCore, with 2 GB RAM (sufficient?), 500 GB HDD and a Blueray slim drive
> (currently looking at an LG CT10N).


I can't really comment on DVB as we don't have that here, but for
bluray, is there a Linux ripping solution now? I haven't looked in a
while so I'm not sure. I wouldn't spend the money unless there were a
known good way to deal with that problem and the encryption. I know
some Windows apps can break it, but last time I looked, the open
source stuff wasn't quite there. Might be easier/cheaper to get a full
size BD drive and use a desktop with Windows for that bit if it's
really important to you.

2GB RAM is fine. I run my Myth boxes on that much and have never
gotten any errors over it, and very little swap use. The Atom might be
a little slow if you plan to do more than record and playback.
Commercial flagging and transcoding will be slower, but if you can
live with that, it should get the job done. I seem to remember reading
a review someone here did saying that it could keep up at almost
realtime on HD, so that's not really that bad. Use VDPAU for playback
and you should be fine.

The HDD and maybe the BD will be the loudest part of the system unless
you get a really loud power supply. :) I didn't find it too bad to
have the HDD in the livingroom, but it probably would have been
annoying in a bedroom. When recording, it sounded like a loud clock,
tick-tick about 1 sec intervals. I've moved to a master backend and
converted my frontends to netboot to get rid of the storage in the
devices. They are near silent now. Just need to get better fans.

I think your plan will work well overall if the tuner works well with Linux.