[mythtvnz] MythTV-NZ Recommended Hardware List

[Steven Ellis]

Phill Coxon wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 16:37 +1200, Dean Pemberton wrote:
>   
>> We have hardware questions on the list from time to time and a lot of 
>> them boil down to..
>> "Whats the recommended hardware for....."
>>
>> Is it worth spending some time working out the MythTV-NZ recommended 
>> machine (or set of machines) so that we can get Steven to put the list 
>> up on the web and point people to it?
>>     
>
> I think this is a great idea. 
>
> Very slowly I've been building a mythtv box - the main reason for the
> delay being I just don't know what direction to go in terms of
> hardware. 
>
> It would be very useful to have recommended minimum hardware
> (particularly CPU, motherboard, graphics card requirements) for a SD
> setup and for a HD setup. 
>
> I'd like to get some feedback on some of the newer motherboards with
> onboard graphics / HDMI - whether they are usable or if it's better to
> go with a separate nvidia card. 
>
> I'd also like some recommendations for making a quieter / silent system
> in terms of case / fan / cooling system etc. 
>
>   
CPU these days is dual core minimum if you have any plans for HD playback.

Graphics - latest NVidia or ATI on board should be sufficient, it
basically comes down to connectivity. For myPVR 2.0 we used the M2NPV-VM
which gave us all of the possible video options on-board.

Hardware Acceleration of H.264 - long way away i'm afraid. NVidia still
won't come to the party and even with the docs from ATI + Intel things
are a while off. Hence the Dual Core.

Ram - 1Gig is cheap, and more RAM really helps HD

Big trick is to watch fans and cooling which is why we used Energy
Efficient CPUs and CoolNQuiet for myPVR.

Personally I'd like to see MythTV be a full feature IPTV and/or UPnP
backend so we can use basic STBs as frontends with all of the HW
acceleration built in.

Steve

-- 
Steven Ellis - Technical Director
OpenMedia Limited
email   - steven at openmedia.co.nz
website - http://www.openmedia.co.nz