thelinuxlink.net

I'm thinking of setting up a Myth box from scratch. I want to do it on a budget. I've been reading a bit about it, but I haven't really found a definitive source of information. Do you have any recommendations for websites/forums?

Here are a few questions that I have:

1) I want to go with a hardware encoder. I'm thinking of Hauppauge WinTV 150. How is that different from the 250? There seems to be a big pric difference, but not much of a feature difference.

2) What's a good TV-out video card to use? From prior experience, NVidia seems to have better support than ATI. I don't want to go too high-end. I have no idea about what their model numbers are and how they compare with each other.

3) Will a small FF PC be able to squeeze in all this hardware? I'm planning to put one big hard disk in it, one tuner card and one video card.

You should definitely watch episode two of Systm, an online TV show, MythTV ins being demonstrated and some hardware show. You can download it here: http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/media

1) In terms of performance the 150 and 250 are virtually identical. Strangely enough the 150 came out after the 250 and is now the current model. There are some subtle differences in the chips on the card and I'm pretty sure it's just cheaper for them to make the 150. They both use the same ivtv driver. I have one of each in my myth machine and can't tell any difference in the quality of captures.

One thing to consider though is that the non mce versions of the 150 come with a nice silver remote with 40 or so buttons that can be programed using Lirc to control the mythfrontend which is pretty damn cool.

2) I would advise Nvidia for use with linux and mythtv. I have used both a Ti 4200 and an Fx 5200 and both were more than adequate for the job. Many even use the mx 400. I just picked up a 5200 with 128Mb ram for $50. If you plan on using Tv-Out then you will certainly want an Nvidia card.

3) I'm assuming FF stands for form factor? It's really a matter of the number of pci slots and the case. If it has enough pci slots and the case doesn't require low profile cards than you should be able to.


In my research the 4 most popular distros to set up with myth are Knoppmyth, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Gentoo.

Knoppmyth is a customized Knoppix disc with a specialized installer and most all of the packages you need to get going.

Fedora, Ubuntu and Gentoo all have excellent how to's that can almost be followed blindly step by step to get going. Google mythtv howto for each and you will find them easily.


I used the following how to and found it an invaluable resource. I have set up a backend/frontend with a fx5200, 1 pvr150, 1 pvr250, Athlon xp 1800 with a 768MB ram. This machine can record two shows at once and play a previously recorded show without a hiccup. After completing that I went ahead and setup a p3 800 machine as just a frontend in the bedroom.

I just finished all this yesterday so it's pretty fresh in my mind if you have more questions. Good Luck.

http://hyams.webhop.net/mythtv/myth_ubuntu.html

I had a Happuage 350 which I later sold to Allan. I originally had it in an 800mhz box with 1 gig of memory (which became our Asterisk box). Besides having an encoder the 350 has a decoder for playback as well as a tv out. Later I built a dedicated box from scratch for about $350. I had an MSI mini-atx motherboard with a 2.4ghz Intel Celeron with 512 meg of ram. It had an onboard SIS video card. This video card was inconsequential because I was using the tv-out of the Hauppauge card to watch the shows on my tv. If you go with a 250 or 150 card you probably need at least a 2 ghz processor since there's no builtin decoder for playback. Thus more CPU will be required. Get the biggest hard drive you can find. 1 hour shows are around 2 gig in size. You can also set it to record at a lower quality or have a script to re-encode the files to another codec such as divx or xvid. I'd like to find a card that encodes directly to theora or xvid. That would be cool.