[mythtv-users] Trimslice ARM PC

[Tyler T]

> I was wondering what, if any, experience people had got using ARM based PC's
> for Myth?

Myth 0.23 and 0.24 compiles and runs on ARM just fine. I use a
SheevaPlug (Kirkwood armv5te) for my MythBE, and there have been
several others that have run Myth on the Seagate Dockstar.

I can record 2 HD ATSC streams from my SiliconDust HD HomeRun and play
back a third (with timestretch!) on my x86 MythFE without saturating
the BE. In theory you can also use any USB tuner that has a driver for
ARM, but this is not well tested. If anyone wants to lend me a
Hauppage HD-PVR I'll be happy to try it. :)

My Sheeva records to a 2.5" USB hard drive. If you want to add more
than one drive for recordings, though, I'd suggest getting an ARM
device with (e)SATA, as USB doesn't scale well.

I think ARM is the perfect platform for a MythBE. ARM devices run
cool, run silent, they're small, and they have no fans to clog with
dust or fail. You can leave it on all the time without sucking a lot
of power, so it can also provide NAS/DNS/DHCP and other network
services 24/7 guilt-free (some can even act as a wireless access
point, so you could eliminate your existing AP and save even more
power/space).

If you go ARM on the BE, you do need to give up transcoding and
commflagging. This isn't an issue for me since I have plenty of disk
space and the rare show I want to transcode for my smartphone I just
use Handbrake on my PC. (If you really wanted to, you could transcode
a couple shows per week -- just make sure a backlog of jobs doesn't
pile up. Or have a powerful slave BE you wake up to do the grunt
work.) I don't bother with commflagging, either, because I'm happy
with the 30-second skip. The final WAF issue is when a reschedule is
triggered in Myth (new/altered recording rule or priority change etc),
it takes ~60 seconds to complete -- so the FE will not immediately
display your changes. Other than that, I have no complaints or regrets
except enduring denigrating comments from certain people on this list
that look down on ARM users. You'll get used to it. :)

I have little experience with ARM as a MythFE, though I'd love to
replace my current FE with ARM. As long as there's some kind of GPU to
offload the video decoding from the CPU, it should work fine. MythFE,
including playback, at least runs on ARM (it worked via VNC on my
headless device at about 1fps). I can't really get a feel for
performance through VNC, but given that my current MythFE is a lowly
Celeron, that dual-core TrimSlice should do at least as well.