[plug] MythTV ??

[Trevor Phillips]

On Tuesday 08 June 2004 09:14, chris.griffin at swiftdsl.com.au wrote:
> I would be very interested in hearing any info on this. It is something I
> would very much like to do as well.

I've created a similar box using Freevo (and given the resources, I'd make 
another one or two ^_^), although I'm not using it for the TV side of things 
yet (although one of these days I'll get a nice PCI digital receiver card to 
put in it).

Hardware depends on a lot of things, and there's not really a definitive guide 
out there. My system is a cheapo SFF Chyang Fun case with a Celeron 2.2GHz 
(Ugh! Celerons suck so badly! If only I had've known...). I'm currently using 
an ATI Radeon 9600XT video card, since the box dual-boots into "GameOS" (now 
if only the CPU... Gah!).

If I was going to start from scratch again, then I'd probably either look at a 
MicroATX form motherboard & case (Antec have some really nice ones. *drool*) 
with a cheapo Athlon/Duron chip - or for a more expensive solution, go with 
MiniITX (http://www.mini-itx.com/) (or NanoITX. Mmmm. Nanode...) with a 
really small case.

The ATI has been great for media purposes. TV-out works a dream. OpenGL sucks 
the big one. I'm an accursed optimist - but even I'm disillusioned by ATI's 
complete lack of driver support this year.

So get a cheapo GeForce card, with a decent TV out. ^_^

You don't overly need lots of CPU grunt unless:
  - You have a crappy video card which won't nicely hardware-scale video for 
playback
  - You want to encode video on the fly
  - You want to play massive (resolution) quicktime files

The second may sound really important - except if you use a digital receiver 
card, then AFAIK, the video comes in compressed, and can be saved directly to 
disk compressed, negating the need for real-time video compression.

Alternately, you can always stick a video card in a beefier machine (like that 
gateway/file/web server in the study), and use it for recording programs, to 
play back on a more light-weight box in the living/lounge.

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: Web Technical Administrator     -          T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                        -              Murdoch University | 
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