[mythtv-users] Low-power/energy-efficient SD backend/server

[John]

On 20/05/10 16:35, Eric Pheatt wrote:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 12:35 PM, John<reidjr at lineone.net>  wrote:
>    
>> On 19/05/10 11:14, Vitani wrote:
>>
>> Good morning all,
>>
>> I'm currently using a full-blown 2.8GHz P4 (with HT) for my backend, but
>> it's costing waaay too much to keep that running 24/7 (and it sounds like
>> the inside of an aeroplane in our living room!). I was wondering if anyone
>> here had any recommendations on what I should replace it with?
>>
>> Things I use the backend for:
>> - Recording 1-3 SD programs simultaneously from a PCI Nova T500 (Dual tuner)
>> - Sharing those recordings, plus other videos, music&  pictures using Samba
>> (my frontends are Xboxes running XBMC)
>> - Mythweb&  Webmin
>> - Transmission torrent client
>>
>> Things I *don't* do:
>> - Transcoding or comm flagging
>> - Live TV
>> - HDTV
>>
>> I've done a bit of Googling, but all the site/thread/posts I find are 2 or
>> more years old, and thus are pretty irrelevant (or are they?). I'm happy to
>> build my own box from scratch, or use something pre-built.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Vitani
>>
>>      
> It's possible on certain nas boxes, but not simple unless you already
> have a full distro up an running.
>
> I'm using a Buffalo based NAS (the Kurobox HG WR) with 128mb ram that
> has been converted to use Debian with lighttp, mythweb. mysql and
> mythbackend as my MBE. I started using it with .20 (with some patching
> and build reconfiguration to get the PowerPC wo/AltiVec working
> properly) but the latest .23 release package from
> debian-multimedia.org installs just fine now without patching as
> altivec is now disabled by default for PowerPC builds. I have a
> Plextor ConvertX PX-TV-402U usb encoder (for analog cable below ch 33)
> and a HDHomeRun for digital ClearQAM and OTA in my setup. There is
> just enough memory, processor and io available to record three things
> at the same time while playing back another recording on an AppleTV
> frontend if you minimize the memory footprint of mysql. I am not doing
> transcoding or comflagging on this machine and have my workstation
> setup with mythjobqueue to take care of those tasks when it is
> available.
>
> But... my setup won't help you keep your Nova-T in a master backend
> since it does not have a pci slot and you would need to get either a
> usb and/or a HDHomeRun capture device.
>
> Here are some links on the specs of my setup:
>
> http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Kurobox_Hardware_and_Description
> http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Mythtv (info from my .20 setup)
>
> I've looked at switching to an ARM based NAS with room for multiple
> drives, but I have not had time to vet the options available myself.
> That said things look promising based on recent posts to the QNAP
> forms (http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=147&t=10572&sid=1108f9b41b70024cfbddbd8a04a899f1&start=10).
>
> Cheers,
> Eric
>
>    
Interesting, As I said in my post above I tried running mythbackend 0.21 
on a Debian install on a buffalo link station, which is arm based, with 
128 M RAM. It all seemed way too heavy in terms of memory use to be 
feasible, even running mysql seemed to be really loading it up. I spent 
some time on it, but never actually got it all running. Does the 
power-PC chip make all the difference ?