Getting started w/ MythTV [was Re: Tivo vs MythTV]

[Dave Johnson]

Paul Lussier writes:
> So, for these 2 systems, can someone give me a rough list of the
> essential-to-have hardware and the cost analysis?
> 
> My main goal here is ease of installation/configuration and minimizing
> as much as possible hardware incompatibility frustration.  I.e., if
> there's a certain MoBo I ought to use or specific hardware combination
> that "just works", tell me.  Cost savings *is* an issue, but time is
> more of an issue.  I don't want to fight with hardware, I want to
> build an appliance that will do it's job with as little interaction
> from me as possible :)

For analog cards, getting one with MPEG2 hardware compression is a
very good idea.  Besides sufficient bandwidth on your PCI bus and
disk controller/disks recording uses very little cpu (read: <2% on a
any modern cpu).

The bandwidth requirements aren't that big. SD should run you about
2-5Mbps, HD about 10-20Mbps. (that's bits not bytes)  As long as you
can sustain the average and not have a congested system that could
cause DMA underruns any motherboard and cpu should be fine.

Note that mythtv, at least IMHO, is quite bloated and the code way too
complicated and confusing to look at.

If you have alot of channels and capture cards the backend database
can get quite large.  Keeping all that in RAM will improve the
performance of the frontend and mythweb especially when getting
channel listings or doing searches. My /var/lib/mysql/mythconverg/ is
about 400MB.  The more memory for the backend the better especially
because it will be doing disk caching.

My frontend is a VIA EPIA SP13000 with 512MB RAM, PXE boots with
nfsroot.  It's plenty fast for SD, but barely fast enough for HD.  I
think this is actually a video dirver problem though.  I'd stick with
a CLE266 based VIA system though as the CN400 graphics is a pain to
get working in X.

CPU requirements aren't that bad for the frontend provided you have
an X driver that supports all the appropriate acceleration extensions,
that's the most important thing to consider.

mythfrontend is using about 120MB of RAM on my frontend computer right now.
Add X and other apps and 256MB or 512MB RAM should be fine.

-- 
Dave