[mythtv-users] Re: Frontend for home theater

[Michael Tiller]

Regarding my previous message (see below) I'm afraid I'm not up on the
latest ins and outs of MythTV hardware. If anybody has the time to take a
quick look at this http://store.yahoo.com/svcompucycle/ss56g.html and let me
know if they see any "gotchas" with running Myth on this system. Will Myth
run with that video chipset? If I can get by with that for playing DVDs then
I would. In the future if I wanted to go to HDTV do you think the addition
of an XvMC card would be sufficient?

I'm sure everybody here is quite busy but, as I said, if anybody has the
time to take a quick look and comment I would very much appreciate it.

--
Mike

On 11/4/05, Michael Tiller <michael.tiller at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At work we just got a $700 computer projector that looks fantastic. I
> hooked my laptop up to it while watching a widescreen DVD and it even seems
> to support the widescreen format quite nicely.
>
> So, I'm thinking about getting one of these for my basement. My plan would
> be to mount it on the ceiling and project it against a wall. I'd also like
> to hook a very simple MythTV frontend up to it. My plan would be to have
> only a DVD reader, small hardrive (if necessary), network and video card in
> it (i.e. no tuner cards and no direct live TV feed to the projector...only
> live TV from a backend over the network).
>
> Here are a few questions:
>
> 1) Any comments on why this might be a bad idea? :-) It sure looks
> attractive to me.
>
> 2) Any special issues with video cards? When I hooked my laptop up the
> projector we have at work, it seemed like my laptop was putting out a
> special resolution on the output port and that the projector was matching
> it. The widescreen version looked great. Will all video cards+X.conf be able
> to provide the optimal widescreen resolution or is this a special feature to
> look for?
>
> 3) The projector we have at work is a 1600 lumens Panasonic. It also seems
> fairly cheap. I get the impression it can support some pretty high
> resolutions (HDTV?)
>
> 4) I've got a fairly nice 5.1 receiver plus speakers. Anything special I
> need to hook that up to a computer? If I play a DVD, will it send a
> pro-logic encoded signal over normal "line out" or do I need to have a sound
> card that can split it up locally and then send out all the signals
> separately? I may just skip the 5.1 for now use simulated surround sound.
>
> 5) I'd like this to be as cheap as possible (WAF). If I'm just using the
> frontend to playback DVDs and programs recorded on a backend, I assume I can
> get by with some pretty low end specs. Since I only need to do playback, I
> suppose a PIII could probably fit the bill although I suspect that might
> actually be hard to find. I have this thought in my head that someday I'll
> have HD quality recordings on my backend. What does it take to get HDTV
> playback (only) for a frontend. The MythTV site mentions some kind of NVIDIA
> acceleration? I probably can't afford to protect for this capability but it
> doesn' t hurt to at least understand the tradeoff.
>
> 6) I considered a diskless configuration (probably save me money), but it
> seems SO COMPLICATED to setup. Could I boot KnoppMyth and then take the DVD
> out? Would that work?!? Then I could save on the disk and just boot the
> thing with a DVD and leave it running all the time. Comments?
>
> Any other suggestions would be very much appreciated. Unfortunately, I
> don't have much time or money so any suggestions along the lines of quick
> and cheap would be very useful.
>
> --
> Mike
>
>
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