John Clarke wrote:
The box will be both back and front end and will be in the lounge room
in the cabinet with the amps, dvd player, etc, so it'll need to be
fairly quiet, especially when idle, but I don't want to hear much when
it's running either. It's going to be inside a cabinet so doesn't have
to be stunningly beautiful, but I don't want it to look spectacularly
ugly either. My budget is $2000.
you probably want a silverstone case. They have some nice ones.
I have one with a buttload of fans in it and its still quieter than the
fish tank.
I want HDMI video to the TV (LCD, 1080p), either with audio or with a
separate analogue audio cable. I also want digital audio (S/PDIF,
preferrably coax) to the amp for better quality stereo or 5.1 audio.
I haven't played with the audio side much yet so I cant help you too
much there.
I'd also like the option of watching either live TV, recorded programs
or ripped DVDs on any other PC on the LAN, at the same time as a
different program is being watched on the TV and maybe another is being
recorded.
Myth will do that provided your not on a wireless network.
ripped dvd's etc will need to be shared over NFS or something as
mythvideo doesn't use the backend to pass the files around.
you can run mythfrontend on the remote sites and it'll pick up the
recorded tv though.
I believe that all of the hardware I'm thinking of is supported by Linux
and MythTV, and although I don't think the necessary drivers are
packaged in any distro yet (I'm thinking of using the latest Mythbuntu,
only because everything else is running Ubuntu), I do know where to get
them. This is my list of hardware:
Asus P5Q SE2 motherboard
Intel Core2Duo E7600 3.06GHz 1066MHz FSB
2GB PC6400 DDR2 RAM
Asus GeForce GT220 1GB DDR3 video card
1.5GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA HDD (ST31500341AS)
Lite-On SATA 240x8 DVD-RW drive
Silverstone LC10-E case
500W power supply
Logitech diNovo Mini bluetooth keyboard
Suggestions specifically.
If you want quiet, ditch the mbo, cpu and separate video card.
the new myth out uses vdpau to accelerate video on anything that
supports it (> nvidia 9300 or so)
I am running an asus P5N7A-VM which has onboard 9300, HDMI, optical
spdif etc.
Except for commercial flagging the atom based ion boards would do
nicely, If you run the commflagging over night then one of those
(especially a dual core) would probably do the whole job.
I have a quad core q6600 in it but I'd put one of the newer quad cores
in it now but its also my everything server (it has 6gb of ram and is
running 5 virtual machines).
keep the clock speed down and it'll keep the temps down. You could
probably get away with a generic dual core. Although if you want to run
commercial flagging while recording you will probably want one cpu per
channel.
I wonder when VDPAU/CUDA enhanced commflagging will come out ;->
CPU load watching HDTV is ~5% or so with VDPAU doing all the work. It
cant *quite* manage advanced 2x deinterlacing for HD footage, I
overclocked it to 9400 speed as well with no change. So if you really
really want to then perhaps an external card. They are typically really
noisy though (relatively speaking).
The blue-ray's I have managed to watch @#...@#%@#$%$%^%&(^%&^$# DRM!!! GRRR!
have played fine on it again at 5% cpu for a 1080P movie (twilight).
and either of:
Hauppage Nova-T-500 MCE dual tuner (PCI)
Hauppage 2200 MCE dual tuner (PCI-E)
That's where your going to have the difficulties with drivers, I haven't
looked but I'm not aware as yet of any PCI-E cards that are supported as
yet out of the box.
There was a twin digital PCI-E tuner floating about with drivers "real
soon now" as I recall.
I'll probably add a second tuner card once I've got it all up and
running. We have occasionally wished for a third tuner in the past (not
often, there's not that much worth watching on TV), so I may as well
have four, just in case :-)
I'm thinking of getting some cheap USB tuners from deal extreme or
similar, the people over on the shepherd list (the TV guide you will
use) have had some good and some bad experiences with them.
Is this hardware powerful enough to do all that I want? Do I need more
CPU grunt? More RAM? More hard drives? Bigger PSU? Anything else?
Way too much CPU ;->
Add another hdd or 2 because myth can use storage pools to reduce the
seek load when recording and playing multiple streams and drives are so
cheap these days.
I'd investigate the possibility of sticking / on a USB stick perhaps so
that the spinning disks can shut down.
Not a big deal in a decent case, I have 4 or 5 drives in mine and I
don't notice them.
The only other thing I can think of is remote control. I'd like to be
able to control it from my Logitech Harmnony One remote, at least for
the most common tasks, so obviously I'll need some sort of IR receiver.
>From what I've read, the USB IrDA dongle I have is unlikely to work, so
I'll need something else. All I've been able to find are receivers
bundled with remote handsets, but I already have half a dozen or so of
those gathering dust and don't need to add another one to the
collection.
I just use the keyboard, the WAF is ok and it seems to work ok as an
everyday thing, Its also handy to be able to jump to another desktop and
google stuff.
I use a shintaro
http://www.shintaro.com.au/products/peripherals/14SH-KEYREMOTE/index.htm
And I now have them for my mother and my father ;->
range is excellent, actually I'm not sure about that, It might be
stupendous, but I have never actually managed to get out of range no
matter how many rooms away I was when I lent on the keyboard.
Advice and suggestions will be gratefully received. I'd like to order
the hardware next week, and I'd appreciate knowing that I've chosen
badly *before* I part with the money :-)
Thanks,
John
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
