[mythtv-users] MythTV Frontend

[Joseph Fry]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Joseph Fry <joe at thefrys.com> wrote:

>
>  I know that this has been beat into the ground -- I love the MythTV FE
>> but I sure wish that there was a cheap way (<$100) to run it for the
>> occasional TV (guest room, etc).
>>
>> Is there any work going toward porting MythFE to non-X86 architectures?
>>
>> I have a crummy Plex interface running in the guest room now but would
>> love to have the REAL DEAL.
>>
>
> I have never understood the difficulty with finding cheap frontends... I
> could find you three for $100 easy.   For example:
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-DC7100-SFF-Desktop-Pent-4-3-0GHz-40GB-HDD-1GB-RAM-DVDROM-NO-OS-S-/221191905156?pt=Desktop_PCs&hash=item3380109f84
>
> I had nearly identical hardware as my primary frontend for the longest
> time, and worked almost as well as my current custom built $400 frontend.
>  I'd probably still be using it if my wife didn't take issue with the
> appearance, of course it was a large Dell GX280 mid-tower so I can't blame
> her.
>

Ok, I realize I was a bit over zealous saying 3 for $100... After shipping
your looking at $40-$50 per workstation.  Add a few bucks for an ADD2 DVI
board to add a DVI port, and a DVI-HDMI cable  (
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Silicon-Orion-ADD2-N-DualPAD-PCI-E-DVI-D-Adapter-Card-P-N-Sil-SC-0066-B1-TMP-/400290950464?pt=US_Video_Cables_Adapters&hash=item5d33332d40)
and your still well under $100.  Many of these kind of computers, not sure
about the linked model, even have headers on the motherboard for SPDIF,
if digital audio is important to you.

Any Pentium 4 2.8GHz or better should have no trouble playing US Broadcast
HD streams using CPU alone.  And if you want you can always make it even
better with a cheap NVIDIA card (say a used GT520) and still put a single
system together for under $100.
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