On 13/07/11 21:40, LeeGroups wrote:
Rob, I think you're getting too hung up big graphics cards and big processors and loads of drives.... :) I've run Myth on that kind of hardware and while it works, it'll cost you a fortune in just electricity... remember ever watt the machine uses will cost you over £1/year... my old Myth box was 220w according to the meter, costing over £230/year in electric alone... never mind the cost of the machine...
It's probably costing me more in electricity at the moment, I've got a P4 2.8GHz with about 5 hard drives, the Athlon II Neo is a low power system, runs at something like 30 watts. I was thinking of just going for 2 drives mirrored, and probably the 'green' drives at that, it'll be a saving on what I'm already running. I'd have to go for a GeForce 8400 or 210 as my TV doesn't have VGA input, only HDMI, so I'd need DVI out and the HP Microserver just has VGA out.
It would also work out cheaper than running my PS3 as a media playback device (and hopefully quieter too!). So basically I'd be replacing 2 boxes with 1.
While Myth can do the whole client/server thing (and it's all very clever), it's a bit overkill for most people, especially since most TV's have the antenna connections right next to them, it seems to make sense to put a combined frontend/backend box under the TV, just like a Tivo/Sky/Cable box.
If I was going to go for a client server system it would be for convenience, the kids have a PC in their bedroom which they watch TV on, they could use MythTV and record episodes of Tracy Beaker etc. :-)
My new (and by new I mean 15 months old) Myth box is a (now discontinued) bottom of the range (even came with Linpus Linux) Acer Revo 3600 (newer versions are available now). Single core 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB laptop hard drive, onboard Nvidia ION graphics (with HDMI out), cost £165 new. Add one MCE remote (off Ebay£15) and one Hauppauge WinTV NOVA-TD dual Freeview USB tuner (Amazon £50). It equals a really sweet setup!
I do like the look of those Revos, I may end up changing my mind and get the Microserver and just use it as a server and then get a Revo eventually. The Microserver attracted me as it was about £130 with cashback.
My original big box setup used KnoppMyth (though to be fair this was four years ago) and took about month (several hours a night) to set everything up with hours of googling, a complete nightmare. When it was finished it worked fine, except that due to all the tweaking to get all that mix of hardware/software to play nice, I was stuck because I was too scared to upgrade for fear of breaking something...
I tried MythTV on Fedora a couple of years ago, that was a bit of a nightmare, didn't help that the Freeview tuner I had only picked up half the channels, still does, just the other half after the digital switchover :-)
For the new box I used Mythbuntu. It took less than 30 mins, most of which was drinking tea waiting for it to install. Everything worked out of the box! The only issue that I had was that sound didn't work over the HDMI lead, a quick google pointed me at the sound app, where I had to activate a setting to do digital sound. Result! About a year later (at the time of the local digital switchover) I had glitch when the old USB tuner stopped working (still not sure why), so I bought the WinTV and it's been absolutely fine since.
Sounds promising. Another factor I have to consider is I have an AV decoder which has coax and optical digital in but no HDMI, and the TV doesn't have any digital outputs. I'm currently trying to find a cheap USB sound card with digital output that will handle streaming DTS and Dolby Digital over either coax or optical connections. I've found one that does it on Windows but it seems that it won't do it with Alsa.
The MythTV setup lets you record two programmes at once (although within limits it can record up to six at once quiet happily) while watching a recording, it does all the season pass/series link stuff, look out for programmes with favourite actors/directors/etc, it let's you watch the recordings on a laptop elsewhere in the house if the kids are watching TV, has a nice web interface for setting up recordings (can be used over the internet with the right router setting), the EPG data is continuously downloaded over the air - and programmes are automatically rescheduled if needed, it can also stream video from other servers/PCs (with minor fiddling) onto the TV, let's you keep/save TV programmes (pull them over to a laptop and burn to DVD), and being so tiny it attaches (with a homemade wooden bracket) to the back of the LCD TV keeping it all looking nice and tidy!
Sounds good. We (well the wife and I) don't watch much telly, probably a couple of hours a week but the kids do tend to watch a bit more than us so maybe being able to record an entire series of shows might be handy to stop the kids squabbling :-)
And as a bonus it only uses 24W... saving £200/year in electric from the old box, cheaper to run than a Sky box and no monthly bills from Sky... :) Result!
That's good. So I guess it's pretty much £1 per watt per year? Rob -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
