Building / Buying a MythTV box

[Ben Scott]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile)
<greg at freephile.com> wrote:
> I was thinking of getting the Dell Studio Hybrid ... or the System76 Koala Mini ...

  Be warned that a lot of those itty bitty boxes don't have the
graphics horsepower to decode high-def on the fly and throw it up on
to the screen.  Or so I'm told.

> ... Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1800 ...

  Support for that particular card seems to be very new.  I''d look
for people reporting in-depth hands-on experience with it before
buying it.  (Yes, I saw that you already bought it.  :)  )

  I've got an HD-5500 from pcHDTV (http://www.pchdtv.com/) PCI card
that I never got around to using.  These were designed for Linux
(Windows drivers provided but not supported, IIRC), and are reported
to work very well.  I'd be willing to sell it at this point.  Mail me
off-list if so.

> I'm re-thinking using my existing PC for the
> backend b/c it's only a 1.2GHz Athlon with 768MB of RAM with similarly
> old motherboard and only USB 1

  My understanding is that the storage backend doesn't need a lot of
CPU or RAM -- just hard disk, and maybe gig Ethernet if you want
multiple high-def streams at once.

  If the storage backend is also doing capture, you're still okay as
long as the capture device has a supported hardware encoder.

-- Ben