Your P II will probably be enough to make everything run and to prove to yourself (or significant other) that it really does work. Once you get going with Mythtv, though, you're going to want a more powerful processor.
I built my first system on an AMD K6, which worked but which was very, very slow to respond. I ended up abandoning that machine and built a fresh one on a P III 750. As long as you can offload most of the heavy processing to extra cards, this is enough to drive a backend/frontend and deliver fast enough response times. This does mean that your TV capture card has to do its processing in hardware. The Hauppage PVR 250 is the obvious choice, particularly for its level of support in Myth, although there are plenty of success stories with the 150/500 (newer, lesser support than 250) and the 350 (same as 250 but with TV-Out that has been problematic). I still use the remote that came with my 250, and I think the rest of the Hauppage PVR cards come with remotes as well. Your graphics card should be fine as long as you avoid OpenGL and 3D effects. If not, there's plenty of solid cards for under $50, like the the nvidia fx5200. The problem you'll run into with a PII 400, besides slow menu response, is that you'll be able to record to mpeg2 no problem, but operations like commercial flagging and transcoding will take forever. Again it's probably enough to get an idea of what MythTV is capable of, but surely you will want something a bit stronger later. Fortunately, the hardware is very cheap and getting cheaper -- check out pcretro.com for great deals on older used/refurbished/unsold hardware. If nothing else, your PII has plenty of power to be a file server later on, particularly after you fill up your 240 GB (which will happen far sooner than you think). If you haven't already, have a look at knoppmyth (http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html). It is a complete MythTV installation built on Debian unstable. Other than that, I can't give you any Debian-specific information, but others on this list and at the Knoppmyth forum can. Good luck, _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
