Hi all, I'm slowly getting up the nerve to make a hardware purchase and start building my first myth box. So, I'm looking for some advice. I've read the docs, and the howtos, but there are still a couple of decisions I'd appreciate advice on.
The system will be for watching DVB-T digital broadcast TV, as well as DVDs. This means that it presumably doesn't need to be terribly powerful from a CPU point of view? No encoding or transcoding to do. It will be in the living room, under the TV, so it has to be quiet and look reasonable. No HDTV; I doubt we'll have HDTV DVB in the UK for a few years. One of the key branch points seems to be on the source of TV-OUT support. On the one hand their are the cute little VIA boards with built in TV-OUT, a graphics chip well supported under linux, in the mini-ITX form factor. The problem with these is that I really want 2 tuners, and I don't much like the idea of USB tuners dangling off the back of what is supposed to be a neat little machine. It *is* possible to buy 2-card PCI risers, but I don't know if they are reliable, or if they even fit inside the cases. (http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/PCI_Risers.html) (but only the most expensive epia, the EPIA SP has SATA, and I think I probably want SATA?) The other approach would be a standard mini-ATX motherboard, in a case large enough to take at least low-profile PCI cards (the AverTV 771 is low-profile, I believe). This would probably mean a socket 939 setup with a cheap AMD64 chip and some expensive quiet fans, and an expensive quiet case. But the sticker is the graphics card. I gather that most people on this list are either using the TV-OUT abilities of their Haupage PVR cards, or are using GeForce cards. A Haupage is clearly pointless in a DVB-only setup, and I really, really, really don't want to have an nvidia card, and nvidia's closed drivers, on the box. The sensible option then seems to be a cheapo Radeon 9250 TV-OUT, which is supported by the gatos drivers. Does anybody have any feedback on this? It's the PCI riser I'm most scared about, I don't understand PCI deeply enough at the hardware level to know if they provide good enough performance for two DVB tuners running in parallel. Many thanks for any advice anyone can offer, Jules Bean _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
