[H-GEN] Setting up a MythTV box

Brendan McCarthy bmccarthy at iinet.net.au
Sun Oct 31 06:18:24 EST 2004


Hi Gaz,

I set this up a few months back so i'll just paste my hardware order,  
not sure on the availability or prices these days

ALBATRON KM18G-Pro with TV out nForce2 VGA  		            $129.00
Antec ARIA Mini PC Case - w/6-in-1 card reader, firewire, USB  $160.00
Western Digital 80Gb 7200RPM IDE HDD 8MB Cache - 3 Year Warrant $107.00
AMD XP2500+ 333FSB (1.83ghz) Retail Box 	                  $135.00
Corsair (333) 256MB Value Select PC-2700 DDR RAM 	$80.00

I got the visionplus Twinhaan digital terrestrial card from  
www.eyo.com.au, which has perfect support in 2.6 series kernels

The tv-out is built on to the motherboard, not the greatest quality,  
but fine enough for me.
The advantage of the PVR cards is a nicer tv-out, but I think its a bit  
harder to get working, and mpeg2 decoding is not exactly stressful on a  
modern system.

For the software both mythtv and freevo are fine. Myth is a bit more  
featureful, but I found freevo easier to customize.

The Twinhaan card comes with a USB remote, that works well with linux  
too, it looks like a USB keyboard, aside from sending some slightly  
funky key combos for some buttons. I'm not sure if the OEM version  
comes with the remote, since it wasnt available at the time.

Depending on the amount you're looking to record, a larger HDD is  
probably in order. Most streams are > 1mb/second, so figure 4gb per  
hour of footage. For long term archival i have a daemon that converts  
the captured streams to xvid avi files with mencoder. I think mythtv  
might have this functionality built in.

cheers,
-Brendan

On 31/10/2004, at 4:41 PM, Gary Curtis wrote:

> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     
>  ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will  
> vanish. ]
>
> Hi List,
>
> I am in the first stage (.au product availablilty and pricing) of  
> setting up
> a MythTV box.  I would appreciate any comment or assistance from
> any Humbugger, via this list or personally, who has been through
> this process or can offer other insights/gotchas.
>
> I'm thinking of mini-ITX (Shuttle or similar) with hardware encoder  
> card
> (Hauppauge PVR-350 perhaps), SATA disk(s), DVD burner, etc.
>
> Budget is not unlimited, but if it will do the job well, I'll find the  
> cash.
>
> Gaz
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ----------------------------
> And remember, it's spelled Gary Curtis, but it's pronounced "Gazilla"
>
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