[ale] Best processor for MythTV?

Jesse Guardiani jesse at guardiani.us
Fri May 19 10:36:14 EDT 2006


Charles Shapiro wrote:
> Hey man, after your astounding presentation at ALE in April I was 
> inspired to start building my own mythTV box.  The Grand Plan is to 
> change my wife's  TV viewing habits so that they intrude less into my life.
> 
> I've acquired a  Shuttle "Zen" ST62K XPC barebones ( 
> http://sys.us.shuttle.com/ModelsK.aspx) and I'm now wondering what 
> processor to put into it. Money is not as important to me as cooling. 
> I'd also like it to have enough muscle to do HDTV when the Dread Day of 
> HDTV Reckoning comes.   After I get the machine running I'll use 
> KnoppMyth for the install.
> 
> I figure on maxing out the memory (heck, it's cheap), and starting out 
> with a 40-gb hard drive I have lyin' around the house. If my wife takes 
> to this thing, I'll probably actually spend money on the hard-drive 
> part. And of course I was gonna get a Hauppauge PVR 350 for the actual 
> video encoding/decoding stuff. I have no current plans to add on the 
> khoul hi-tech bellz & whistles Jesse demonstrated. Unless, of course, I 
> get real ambitious..
>  
> Your thoughts?


Shortly after that meeting, the mythtv developers announced that support
inside myth for the PVR 350's hardware decoder is deprecated. I highly
recommend going with a PVR-150 + Nvidia 5200, or PVR-500 + Nvidia 5200
combination. I also have an Nvidia 6200, but they can be finicky, especially
when used in conjunction with an 8X AGP interface (4X seems to work fine though).

Actually, I've been using HDTV with a similar combination for a few months
now, and while it works fine for SDTV, I firmly believe that dedicated,
separate frontends are the way to go for HDTV in the future. This separation
lowers in-living room noise, raises reliability (because the frontend can
crash all it wants without bringing the backend with it), improves playback
quality (nvidia solutions work, but they tend to stutter, use lots of CPU,
fail to do bob deint properly, or some combination of these), lowers heat and
thus wear and tear on your CPU and HDD, and improves usability (because you
can have a frontend for each TV).

There are many dedicated SDTV options currently available, some of
which I touched on at the meeting, and a few HDTV options as well. I'm
personally going to be adding my own hardware to the mix by building and
selling custom dedicated SDTV frontends starting at about $350 and HDTV
frontends starting at about $400, complete with remote control. Expect
these to become available either at the end of this month, or beginning
of next.

Hope that helps. Feel free to ask me anything.


-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at guardiani.us




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