On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 18:19 +0000, colliepon wrote: > Just curious both what other people are doing, and feature discussion (not > b*tching :) on other methods of reducing the power use of a myth box since it > can build up over awhile. (and my next move may very well be off grid - > satellite TV, running off solar or wind, so power use is critical but i'd > prefer an alternative to the VCR) A few examples i'm thinking of: > > Could you schedule an expected time-on and time off to work with a normal > block of programming? By shut down time I mean to properly suspend all tasks > like commercial flagging without screwing up data or not doing them during > the week at all. This would let you use a standard analog or digital wall > timer to turn on the computer and satellite receiver for a given block of > time (for instance 6:30pm to 10pm if you mostly like the evening block, or > 11pm to about 3am if you like Adult Swim) since I don't know any other way to > tell a computer to turn on at a given time. :) (though if someone knows of a > computer-programmable wakeup solution please tell me!) > > Or perhaps having a C3 machine with a PVR500 for 24hr recording which can > wake up a P4 with another card for overflow during peak hours, and also to do > things like commercial flagging or recompression. (which also might need to > schedule file moves, for instance a 120gig drive on the C3 and 500gig on the > P4 as primary storage) > > Or maybe speed throttling certain cpu's might work - some of the new Centrino > motherboards for desktop use > http://www17.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20041224/index.html, laptops with a > USB grabber, or even the underclocked Athlon XP > http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041001/index.html - does anyone use > anything like this? (or have any experience/insights worth sharing?) I've no > clue how/if throttling is supported in linux, or mythTV or anything else, but > it would be nice to let the cpu idle during daily recording and to speed up > for flagging and transcoding. > > Is anyone else using a lower power design or strategy with Myth? > > > Colliepon > > _______________________________________________ > mythtv-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
I rather doubt that anything you can build yourself will every be 100% designed to be efficient on power. That being said I'd seriously look at laptops. If there is some way to get myth working with a power efficient laptop, perhaps with some kind of Video to Firewire bridge then your power issues are solved. Of course that might not be possible, and I don't know of any laptops that support pci cards, although some might have a docking bay. They are about the only entire systems I can think of that Must be designed to be low power, that is assuming they are any good. Of course you can design a PC from the ground up to save power, but it will still likely be considerably higher than a laptop probably..
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