[ale] Best processor for MythTV?

[Charles Shapiro]

Yeah, that's pretty ok helpful. Looks like the Shuttle comes with an ATI
Radeon 9100 chipset on board, so I reckon that's what I'm going with.
There's only one card slot in the box, and of course that's already taken.
I'd very much like to experiment with the FM radio stuff -- I ain't much for
TV, but I likes my radio. I reckon I'm actually lookin' at a PVR 150 then --
thanks for the tip.

I might go with a separate front-end (maybe an old X-Box) in the future, but
for this first cut it's all gonna be in one box. The Zen is s'posed to be
pretty quiet, in any case.

But what processor is just fast enough?

-- CHS


On 5/19/06, Jesse Guardiani <jesse at guardiani.us> wrote:
>
> 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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>
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