[mythtv-users] MythTV Frontend upgrade

Rich West Rich.West at wesmo.com
Sat Apr 18 03:09:54 UTC 2009


I'm considering upgrading my MythTV Frontend systems from the very quiet
Shuttle systems to something less dependent upon a video card for HD.

What I have Now:
I've got three shuttle systems each with an AMD64 3000 single core
processor, 1 GB of RAM, a small laptop hard drive, the quiet shuttle
heat-pipe setup, and a 512MB NVIDIA 6200 (AGP) video card.

I've got one backend system just for recordings, and a separate system
serving out 4TB of striped storage containing DVD ISO's.  This
filesystem is mounted via NFS to the frontends when playing ISO's.

The Problem:
Due to a bug introduced in the NVIDIA drivers, I can't upgrade from the
100.14.11 release without getting choppy video.  100.14.11 won't compile
on the later kernels, so I am stuck at the kernel that I am at.  In
addition, I am seeing pretty frequent choppiness when playing the DVD
ISO's off of the NFS storage.

A test upgrade to the latest kernel (via Fedora 10) cleared up the
choppy playback, but, alas, I had to run a later NVIDIA driver.  That
caused the processor load to go to 100% when playing back HD content
which caused that to be choppy.

The Solution?
I'm considering introducing new hardware and selling off what I have.  I
was thinking of something like a microATX motherboard with a medium
powered dual-core processor with a minimum of 1GB of RAM and DVI (or
HDMI.. or both) out.  However, I'm having a bit of difficulty in finding
a smallish case (one that fits in an entertainment center).  Possibly
something similar to
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811145004 in size
(13inches x 13.5 inches x 5.5 inches), but I am also concerned that
anything like that would have a noisy processor and power supply fan. 
I'm a bit spoiled by the Shuttle case (one small fan for the power
supply, and a heat pipe setup to a single case fan for the processor..
which averages around 1000RPM) and was hoping to construct something
similar.

I'm at the point where I believe that the price of the hardware has come
down enough such that a dual-core setup would be inexpensive enough to
build powerful enough frontends to drive HD content without the funky
custom nvidia drivers (although, I do not know if this is necessarily true).

Does anyone have any recommendations?  Also, frankly, I'm tired of the
Fedora release cycle.. I don't need it for these frontend-only systems
and while it tends to fix some things, it also tends to break other
things (hence, the predicament I am in now). CentOS would be great if it
has the necessary driver support for current hardware and the repo is
reliable (I seem to recall ATrpms's once having CentOS as a beta or test
repo). 

Thanks!
-Rich


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