[Tfug] Myth/HTPC

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 07:26:29PM -0700, Steven Bowers wrote:
>Looking for some general feedback on the specs for a HTPC/Myth box. I 
>have an "old" Intel SAI2 motherboard, dual 1Ghz P3, 2GB of RAM and lots 
>of free PCI slots. How viable is this for a HTPC? After reading the Myth 
>TV site it sounds like I would have to invest in a whole new P4 system, 
>especially if I wanted to do anything with HD content. Before I did that 
>I thought I would see what are the current experiences of others. 
>Currently I'm interested in using a HTPC system for hulu.com and some 
>other streaming sites, maybe recording some HD from OTA channels, 
>watching some mpeg and other material downloaded of the net and general 
>web browsing.
>
>Steve

If you're looking mainly at MPEG2 playback, you'd be surprised at what little
hardware you need to have a decent Mythbox (I don't know about hulu
requirements, though).

Personally, I have a many-function box.  It's a AthlonXP 2200+ with 1GB RAM.
It serves as both my MythTV backend and frontend as well as a RAID-1 file
server, my Asterisk PBX, and occasional torrent downloader (since it is always
on).  It also does a few more seldomly used tasks, like running apache.  Until
recently I used it to run a couple of email accounts for family.

The machine is on a simple UPS and has three hard drives.  Two drives are in
the RAID-1 configuration for the file server and the third drive is used
solely for MythTV recordings.

I have a Hauppauge PVR-250 MPEG2 encoder card and an inexpensive (~$40) Nvidia
card for display since Myth can do Vsync on those cards.  All video decoding
is handled by the CPU.

Still, it's mostly a personal machine so none of that has a major impact on
performance.  TV recording and playback has always been perfectly fine, as are
Xvid/divx videos and DVDs.

This machine does *not* handle anything HD, though, and I know the hardware
definitely couldn't handle that.  In the near future I may be adding a second
frontend, but that is primarily a load on the drives and I'm pretty sure there
won't be any problems.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
                        Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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