MythTV install workshop?

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Tue Oct 24 20:08:15 UTC 2006


On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 02:03:15PM -0400, Colin McGregor wrote:
> Well, lets start by looking at some options. Since we
> are talking about people hauling PC(s) to a location I
> would suggest a Saturday or Sunday (hauling a PC on
> TTC is at the best of times a PAIN made worse during
> rush hour, and this is what some folks would be
> doing...). Further by using a weekend morning we can
> get out of being worried about running 1-2 hours late
> the way we would on a weekday. Is Nov. 4/5 an option
> at the cafe, and if so which day is quieter?
> 
> Next question, how many people would want to be
> involved in this? You would be looking at coming in
> with a PC with these sorts of specs (or better):
> 
> - PIII 750 MHz (better recomended)
> - 256 MB RAM (more recomended)
> - 80 GB hard drive (can be done with 2 x 40 GB drives
> but MUCH more is recomended)
> - 1 or more Linux support TV tuner cards (ideally the
> ones supported under the ivtv drivers see:
> http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Main_Page)
> - Video card (ideally one that can do mpeg decoding,
> such as a Hauppage PVR-350 or the nVidia 5200 (or
> better) video cards)

Playback is no big deal as long as the video card has decent xvideo
support.  Encoding mpeg2 is best done in hardware (which any of the
PVR-xxx cards do).  A card with svideo/composite/component output is
nice for connecting to the TV.  The PVR-350 of course allows you to have
the TV as a totally seperate output device (although I think you can too
with nvidia using dual head setup.) and it does mpeg2 decoding in
hardware, which I guess matters more if your machine is real slow, or
might be busy doing other things.

My system consists of:

Athlon XP 1700+ (I have a 2400+ I am going to try in it soon)

80mm low speed fan heat sink for cpu

A7N8X-E-DX mainboard

2 x 512MB PC3200 RAM (running as whatever the BIOS thinks is
fastest/least latency for a 266FSB cpu).

2 x 120GB WD SATA drives running raid1 of the mainboard.  I made 19G for
/ as one raid1, and another raid1 for the rest, which LVM then divides
into 1GB swap, 10GB /home, and the rest as /data for storing things like
/data/mythtv and whatever else needs lots of space).  I hate loosing
everything due to disk failure, so raid1 is now mandetory on all
machines in my opinion.

PVR-500MCE dual tuner capture card

SilverStone LC16M-S case with imon-pad remote and 2x16 character VFD, as
well as 7 buttons and a clickable wheel on the case.

SilverStone 400W quiet power supply for 120mm fan.

PX760A DVD-writer.

FX5200 with svideo out.

Some day when I have money lying around or something, I may add another
4 sata drives in raid5 for extra space for mythtv.  A second PVR500MCE
might also be an option if I ever find 2 tuners aren't enough to solve
scheduling conflicts.

The whole thing runs debian unstable with mythtv packages from
www.debian-multimedia.org currently using 0.20-whateverfixtheyareonnow.

I love the new mytharchive in 0.20.  Finally a way to easily make valid
DVDs with shows I want to keep.

--
Len Sorensen
--
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