Doug; I'm building a MythTV myself. I have not yet finished because I'm particular about the case (and struggling with it - so many BAD desktop- format cases out there!) Anyway, some quick points and then some links:
Here's an anandtech link to get you started: http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2190&p=1 And my favorite vendor: http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/products_id/138/ref=cnet (NO financial or pecuinary connection to this vendor...) They have vid cards, cases, etc. and focus on the HTPC builder. > Here is the basic machine I'm considering. > > I'm considering recycling an athlon duron 800 with 512 mb ram. Gentoo is a good distro for this because it's "clean". You want a minimum of parasitic daemons like sendmail or cups to deal with. 512MB RAM oughta be OK. You are going to want a decent vid card with an "S- video out" port, and of course, a TV that can accept S-video. If you don't have such a TV already, you'll have to buy a converter box for PC- to-TV. TigerDirect has these in abundance. > The machine by itself would be too slow so, I'm going to buy a tv card, > probably a hauppage (sp?) wintv 250 or 350. > Has anyone seen any benefit of the 350 over the 250 in practice? > Any other tv tuners people have been impressed with to use for this > purpose? The 150 is a new card with a good DSP. The 250 includes FM tuner capability (which I desire) The 500 has dual 250's on one card. I think I read somewhere don't buy the 350, it's an older DSP? I have looked with lust upon the cheaper Pinnacle and AvMedia TV tuner cards (TigerDirect, $80, no rebate) but don't know a soul who's using them. The MythTV folks stick pretty close to the Pinnacle cards MythTV builders who write about their experience are only using the Hauppage 250 - it's got a fantastic "Connexant" DSP that does the hardware-based encoding and makes using a Duron 800 a feasible proposition. The 250 comes with a remote control that some people are using just fine with MythTV. The 500 does not come with a remote, I plan to use a wireless keyboard instead. I got my own "500" card from, of all places, www.cdw.com. There's also a vendor who specializes in PVR hardware for PC builders, with very competitive prices. Our own T. Lovelace has gotten a Pinnacle card working under Linux: http://wtl.wayfarer.org/bt848.php Be Careful! There's a lot of stuff in TV-tunerland that people don't like. I was brokenhearted to learn my favorite vendor, ATI, has really fallen behind in tuner cards: their TV-wonder series is not in use very much by the MythTV crowd, and those who have used ATI products are using only a small subset, not the older All-In-Wonder cards, which is a real shame. The early All-in-wonder cards were great hardware plagued by mediocre and non-functional software. > I'll be adding a larger hard drive, probably 200gb range. 200GB is a good size. SATA if you've not bought it yet, ATA-133 is OK with the 8MB cache, 7200RPM models. I hear people talk about 80GB drives or 160's, but think of a DVD: 4 to 7GB of video and features. If you want to rip your own DVD collection to disk (and sell the originals on ebay to pay for your media PC, or if you've conned the wife unit with this line...:-) you'll need at least 200GB, probably 300 would be nicer. > A wireless nic so I can save some of the shows I want to keep to a > larger file server and to grab the xmltv feed. That's ambitious and a very nice idea. Would be interested in hearing how that performs. You'll be looking at the "pre-N" routers, then? Even over USB 2.0 (450Mbps) you're looking at 13-16 minutes to move 2 hrs of video of reasonable quality and sound. I'm looking at 100mbps or even gig ethernet. I'd like the ability to keep things on a big server and access them from the PVR system. But you've got my attention with wireless.. Here are some links I've found useful in my research. They helped me narrow down the card to choose. No one has any opinions about the motherboards, CPU's or drives, everyone just uses what they have, it's the Vid capture cards they get picky about. http://freevo.sourceforge.net/hardware.html http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2004/09/anand_builds_a_.html http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2190&p=1 http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/remotes.php http://home.comcast.net/~alf_park/mythtv.html http://gatos.sourceforge.net/supported_cards.php JKB -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
