[mythtv-users] Hardware review before the plunge..

[Jarod C. Wilson]

On Mar 7, 2004, at 09:16, Matthew Geller wrote:

> Jarod,
>
> I noticed you went for an Audigy vs. the on board Chaintech 7NIF2 sound
> card.  You mention the video is good enough, but is the sound?

I'm using the Audigy because I wanted digital out, had a spare Audigy 
laying about, and the Chaintech S/PDIF header is hard to come by. I've 
never touched the onboard audio, so I can't really comment on it. 
Generally though, good PCI sound cards are of better quality than 
onboard, but keep in mind that I'm outputting to a rather nice Yamaha 
amp and 6.1 surround sound system. If you're just hooking to a TV, I'm 
sure the onboard sound is fine.

> When considering configurations.  What are the pros/cons of a master 
> and
> master slave vs. backend and multiple frontends?

Having all the capture cards in one machine can be both good and bad... 
I think distributed cards have more benefit when using a 
non-hardware-encoding card, but capture cpu usage is so low with the 
PVR-x50, its a non-issue. I'd just assume put them all in one machine, 
so my recordings are all in one place (could use NFS, but why use up 
the network bandwidth unnecessarily?). Though free PCI slots could be 
an issue (which is part of why my 3rd tuner is in the slave, not the 
master).

Also, up until MythTV 0.14, browsing the epg and your recordings was 
painfully slow on remote frontends. Its great now though, which leads 
me to my next paragraph...

> I was leaning towards single backend and multiple frontends.  I can 
> keep
> down the size, noise and cost of the frontends.  Yet have a huge old 
> backend
> with loud drives and multiple capture cards to feed the house.  
> Cheaper to
> run CAT5 then coax.

Now that I've moved my rack out to my garage, I'm contemplating ripping 
the hard drives out of both my current systems, and either net-boot 
them or get some small quiet drives, with one monster capture backend 
(out in the garage)...

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

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