I haven't used it, but there is support for "wake a backend" in MythTV. One method writes the wake-up time into the PC's CMOS, then shuts down. The PC wakes itself to record. If you happen to have another PC that stays on all the time, you can send a Wake-On-LAN packet to the backend PC, assuming it has WOL support.

As far as quiet, possibly lower power, you might squeeze the base system onto a compact flash drive. Set the recording drives to sleep when not in use.

You could look into solar panels too :-)

Regards,
  JJ

On 17-Jan-2005, at 01:38, Greg Cope wrote:

What's wrong with what you have?

The Mprocessors and motherboards are very expensive - to the point
that I thought the cost/benefit would be an issue.

Thought about the VIA stuff?

Greg


On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 21:48:55 -0800, Kristo Kriechbaum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So I'm looking to build a backend only machine that consumes the least
amount of power.  My first thought is to go with something like a
Pentium-M, so if I need a little extra cpu for transcoding or
something, I can get it, but can throttle it down when I don't need
it.

Right now, my backend/frontend is:
P3 900 MHz
512 MB ram
2 x Avermedia M179 (just like a PVR250)
1 x 200 gig ide hd
1 x 250 gig ide hd

and I have a third 200 gig ide hd sitting around while I build this
machine.

My main requirements:

1. Low low power.  I don't want to be keeping the electric company in
business :-)
2. quiet.  I don't want the room this machine is in to sound like an
airport.  I don't mind hacking in a bigger slower fan.
3. ample PCI slots for my M179's and at least one IDE controller (and
maybe an hdtv card in the near future).

I hardly ever transcode anything, and I have the mpeg2 encoder cards,
so I don't really need much raw processing power.  This machine will
also share out my music, videos, etc.

Like I said above, my first thought is to go with a Pentium-M 1.6 GHz.
I would just as easily go with AMD, as they are much cheaper, I just
don't know as much about their mobile processors.  My laptop has a
Pentium-M, so I know that the cpu throttling "just works" with
cpuspeed.  I've found various related threads in the archives, but
nothing that ended up verifying my thoughts.

Thanks for any help/suggestions!

Kristo


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