Building / Buying a MythTV box

[Drew Van Zandt]

I helped my (ex) father-in-law set up a mythdora system, and last weekend
ported it to mythbuntu.  Of the two, Mythbuntu is far, far better, though
still a little quirky.  I recommend that for the HD encoding you get an
HDHomeRun, rather than a tuner card - it's supported and neatly sidesteps a
host of issues.  That lets you get a silent (or at least quiet)  box as your
combo front/back end, the only reason to split at that point is if you want
the hard drive rooms away from the screen.  It also takes encoding away from
the back end, so you could recycle your old box into the basement and make
it primarily a fileserver/backend.

--DTVZ

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Neil Joseph Schelly
<neil at jenandneil.com>wrote:

> On Friday 20 March 2009 12:22:14 pm Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
> > I'm undecided about whether it's going to be easier/better/cheaper to
> > run a single unit with maybe a USB external drive attached or run a
> > front-end that is small and pretty with a backend on the rack in the
> > basement.  I do have a wire shelf rack in the basement with UPS and
> > the house is wired with CAT5.
>
> I'm not up on the latest and greatest hardware out there.  I only learn
> that
> stuff when I need to rebuild or repair my current MythBox due to hardware
> failures. I'm cheap and hardware will fail every couple of years and
> sometimes more for me.  As it's been awhile since I've done a rebuild, I'm
> just not familiar with the various hardware Myth-in-a-box solutions or the
> best tuner cards you can get.
>
> I will say this though.  I know that the next time I build it up again, I
> really want a dual-machine setup.  I like having my servers centralized and
> the idea of a cheap lightweight frontend appeals to me.  It's not that big
> a
> deal, but I keep wishing I had that setup for various small little reasons,
> so if you can swing it, it's probably worthwhile.
>
> -N
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