Building / Buying a MythTV box

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tuesday 24 March 2009 20:48:59 Ben Scott wrote:
> 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.

The Dell Studio Hybrid does (I have one, watching HDTV on it now). Don't know 
about the other.

> > ... 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 have an HVR-1800 also, it works just fine (tested w/2.6.27 and 2.6.29).

>   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.

Yup. Although its nice to have some cpu for commercial flagging and 
transcoding.

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

Remember: for (non-encrypted) hdtv and digital standard-def stuff, no hardware 
encoder needed, you're just dumping the mpeg2 transport stream (or individual 
program stream if you have pid filtering enabled) to disk.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com