[mythtv-users] Hardware ideas

[David Wood]

Thank you very much for replying.

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Stephen Tait wrote:

> IIRC, Athlon 2600's have the best power/watt ratio. If you do use big hard
> drives, make sure they're quiet - personally, I'd recommend a seperate
> system disc and storage disc or (even better) keeping the storage on a
> completely different machine.

Thanks - that's good to know. I thought seriously about splitting the
frontend from the backend but it's not practical for me, so I'll end up
compromising there.

> IANAPVR350U, but no, you won't have any problems playing back anything
> MPEG2 related. MPEG4 (e.g. xvids and transcoded TV shows) won't of course
> be able to use any of the MPEG2 decoding hardware, so must all be done in
> software, which is why you need a fairly beefy CPU.

I've read the PVR350 has the best quality of the readily available "TV
out" hardware. Then again, I get the sense that (necessarily) there are
"issues" with it just because the driver is still in active development. I
had also heard than when used for things other than MPEG2 decoding there
were problems - that in fact you can't do Divx/xvid/etc at all at the
moment due to driver issues (ordinary 2d performance too slow?).

Can any 350 owners confirm/deny? This would make or break for me.

I've learned not to buy hardware in advance and "wait out"  driver
issues... often you wait until you fix it yourself.  :)

> Well, the combo of the PVR-250 and an nVidia card (GeForceFX 4000 in my
> case) has proved stable, fast and reliable, despite closed source drivers
> (I stuck with the 2.4 kernel, as 2.6 still has some creases that need
> sorting out WRT to nVidia and ivtv).

Actually, I'd love to know more specifically what those creases were!

Now I am thinking of maybe going in another direction altogether and just
relying on the CPU, using something like an AverTV stereo (bttv) and
mx440. This would be cheaper and maybe easier, given that (I think) I have
the CPU horsepower to do better compression anyway? Or will I?

That leaves out the LCD remote, but it looks easy enough to cobble one
together.

> TBH, I'm not keen on the Antec HTPC cases. They're quite pretty, and I'm a
> big fan of Antec's other kit (their dirt cheap 4U is *amazing* for the
> price, and their PSU's kick total ass), but reviews say their HTPC cases
> run hot and are rather noisy, so I shied away. I went with a CoolerMaster
> 620 BX myself (mATX) which has the added advantage of *not* using a
> proprietary small form factor PSU (which are very expensive to replace when
> the fan goes!). I chucked in a nice ATX PSU, 7Volted the CPU and system and
> it's very quiet indeed and runs cool to boot.

I read the same thing about that Antec case. It's interesting, a lot of
the HTCP cases I've seen are still too deep (over 14").

The newegg link in my original post is a $40 miniATX desktop case that
looks "OK," fits in the stereo rack, and has 4 full-height PCI slots. I'm
seriously thinking about it. Only sad thing is that, with 1 5.25"  drive
slot, there's nowhere for LCD to go.

> Personally, as soon as my current workstation is replaced with a hulking
> dual Opteron monster, I'm going to shove as many digital TV cards as I can
> onto my current 2800/Abit mobo and throw it in a cupboard under the stairs.
> I'll keep one or two PVR-250's in the frontends, but that is all. The less
> equipment you have under your TV and the more centtralised the system is,
> the better.

:D