[mythtvnz] Minimum specs for PVR

[Robin Gilks]

> Hi guys... I've been lurking in this mailing list for several months and
> have
> played with several releases of Knoppmyth on my desktop PC but want to
> build up
> a dedicated PVR so I'm after a few tips.
>
> I don't want to build a huge system at this stage, I basically just want
> to
> build up a system to play around with and use to replace my VCR. Ideally
> I'd be
> after an ITX (or similair) based system in a small(ish) case with a single
> channel PVR150 and remote and a largeish HDD.
>
> Are any of the Via Mini ITX boards with onboard TV out any good with
> MythTV?
> Are these boards powerful enough to do a good job? What speed Via
> processor
> would I ideally need for a usable system or am I better looking at
> something
> else such as a P4/Celeron ITX board?

I'm using an Epia SP13000, with 512M RAM, in a diskless config with it
booting off my server box where I've got 600G of raid5 and 50G of raid1 to
provide a nice safe environment for my OS image (Gentoo), TV recordings,
audio files, pictures and videos.

On my 25" Panasonic TV I get a wee bit too much overscan but the picture
quality is great - at least as good as my dedicated DVD player. I mostly
use a Sky box coming into the the svideo input of a PVR150mce card (the
retail version with the really good USB remote) and I take the svideo out
of the m/b to the TV.

I consider it to be mature enough now that I'm going to sell the DVD
player, the VCR will move into the office and connect into the system via
an old WinTV (BT848) card (its only been used once this year!) and I'm
going to upgrade the TV to LCD and the stereo to a theatre system and try
and get the spdif output going.

I'm running latest SVN code (will be 0.20 in the next couple of weeks I
expect) and the new things like MythArchive are brilliant. Recommended!

The fan in the PSU on the case I have is a bit noisy - I'm going to try a
12v car type PSU and an extrnal brick so I only have to tackle the CPU fan
then (I'll try large and slow for that) but its only noticable when the
mute is active.


-- 
Robin Gilks