Lan Barnes wrote: [snip]
Google tells me that I might land MB and CPU for ~$100. That I can swing (I'll put the cats on ebay).
You can get a brand new motherboard and CPU for less than that. Looking in ComputorEdge shows several deals at about $85 for an AMD Sempron and motherboard.
It also looks to my untrained eye like I can move memory and my 2 pvr-150s over. The on-board sound and video should be good to go. Are you able to utilize the on-board mpeg2 HW decoding? That would be cool.
Are you referring to the motherboard I mentioned? Memory needs to be DDR2-533 or DDR2-667 so your old memory isn't useful.
I haven't tried using the MPEG-2 decoder yet. The CPU load when playing back Standard Definition TV is about 40%. Recording using a Hauppauge PVR-150 only takes about 2% load. The board keeps up with commercial flagging while recording.
Could you confrm the above guesses? Also, where is the best place to shop for this? Fry's <tremble>? CCC? Other?
I bought my motherboard at ClubIT <http://www.clubit.com> for $60 and got 1GB RAM for $30 awaiting $15 in rebates.
The discarded parts could probably be stitched together to make a reasonable Linux desktop or even home server. I've wanted to experiment with CentOS. Or, my beloved granny user could use an upgrade. I have options.
See if any KPLUGers will give you a case. Gus -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
