[mythtv-users] Home media system

[Brian Wood]

peter nikolic wrote:

>>
>>
>> In my opinion the apple tv is the best frontend/bang for the buck around.
>> Which is a wireless HD frontend with built in IR and nearly dead silent.
>> $200.00 each.
> I would be using decent small footprint PC's with high end Nvidia video cards 
> have to admit to not being a great Apple fan 

Don't go "too" high-end with the nVidia cards. Actually, anything
"better" than a 5200 is pretty much wasted. In fact, the 5xxx series
cards had chroma-key, while later cards didn't, and the most recent
cards have no XvMC support in Linux.

The requirements for gaming and those for Myth are very different.

> 
> 
> I had thought of gigabit ethernet for the distributionas getting the wiring in 
> will be very easy using 2 or 3 gigabit cards on the server and as many 
> gigabit switches so each one is only lightly loaded .
> 
> 
>> Then your going to need a nice hardy backend with at minimum 
>> 5 tuners and 2-4 TB of storage. (Don't skimp on the backend machine!!!)
>>
> What would you say for the back end box   i was thinking along the lines of 
> AMD 64x2  8Gb Ram  300Gb Sata for the system then a few Tb of NAS storage for 
> data / recordings  , Then there is the question of the DVD Play side what 
> drives are there out ther that can simultainiousley(SP)  play say 2 or 3 DVD 
> films or is it a case of multiple single drives ? 

The OS and Myth don't require anything close to 300GB. You storage
system, whether NAS or local, needs as much speed as possible. I'd
consider RAID not so much for redundancy as for the speed. RAID0 is
actually the fastest, but increases the risk of a bad drive taking it down.

You do not want to have your database and video storage on the same spindle.

beww