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Re: [LUG] MythTV etc

 

On Sunday 21 May 2006 15:26, Ben Goodger wrote:
>
> Can anyone recommend a stupidly underspecified, small and ultra-silent PC I
> could obtain to stick mythfrontend on? Obviously its only functionality
> will be starting knoppmyth, logging into GNOME, and decoding a live MPEG-2
> stream. I'm talking 500mHz PII here, or something... Must also be very
> cheap, I'm on a budget of £600 for that, two tuners, cables and parts of a
> new desktop for myself.

You'll have to do better than 500MHz I'm afraid. I have a Via C3 1GHz machine 
I wanted to use as a mythfrontend and it just couldn't cope with decoding the 
video - and that was using an ultra-lightweight windowing system 
(ratpoison[1]) on a cut-down Debian install.

You'll need around 1.5GHz to 2GHz.

>
> Also advice on the tuner cards -- should I buy digital now or upgrade in
> 2008? And given the computer will be an Athlon XP 2400+ with a gig of RAM
> and also be functioning as an FTP, NFS and HTTP server, should I purchase a
> hardware tuner?
>

Get digital now - more channels, less stress on the machine as you don't have 
to encode the video and they're not terribly more expensive than analogue 
cards.
But don't get cards based on the bt878 chipset as they're rubbish[2] - get 
cards based on any other chipset, such as the cx88 (e.g. the Hauppauge 
Nova-T).

Regards,
David.

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/
[2] http://www.linuxtv.org/pipermail/linux-dvb/2005-July/003920.html

-- 
David Johnson
www.david-web.co.uk - My Personal Website
www.penguincomputing.co.uk - Need a Web Developer?

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