[mythtvnz] My New Setup

[David Kirk]

Hey everyone,

I posted a while ago asking about hardware recommendations for my
first MythTV box.  I thought I should report in and let you all know
how I got on.

My setup is a backend/frontend in the same box.  I know it would be
better to separate them out, but getting ethernet to where the TV is
would just be too hard.  And, the GF looked at me a bit funny when I
mentioned that we would need 2 boxes for watching TV.

I got a Antec NSK1480 case and put a Gigabyte GA-M85M-U2SH motherboard
in it.  The motherboard has a NVidia GeForce 8200 chipset built in.
That motherboard was very hard to get hold of.  There were a few
online vendors who showed that they had them, but when it came time to
order, they didn't have the stock and couldn't get it.  I ended up
getting it from Global PC for a lot more that it was being advertised
everywhere else (even after the discount they gave me).  What's really
disappointing though, is that there are some other cheaper
motherboards available with GeForce 7xxx chipsets on them.  Aparently
they also support VDPAU.  Too late, it's done now.

I put an AMDII 250 CPU in there with 2GB of RAM.  After reading some
reviews of the case I was buying I decided that the Scythe Big
Shuriken fan would keep the CPU cool without making too much noise.

I got the TBS 6980 Dual DVB-S/S2 tuner card.  Initially I had a bit of
trouble with this, but it wasn't anything wrong with the card, it was
just me.  I didn't have a splitter so I could plug both tuners in.  I
plugged in to the one labelled LNB1 assuming that it would be the
first tuner.  When I tried to tune in the channels, I got nothing.  It
turns out that Linux had loaded them in the reverse order, so LNB1 was
the second tuner and LNB2 was the first.  Once I got a splitter in
there everything worked fine.  Just so you know though, I did need to
compile some drivers first, but that was pretty easy when following
the instructions in the README.

The TBS6980 does come with a IR receiver, but apparently drivers are
still under development for this.  I haven't bothered with it yet.

I'm running Mythbuntu 10.4 and it seems to be working well.  So far I
have managed to successfully record 3 channels simultaneously while
watching another recording.  The box doesn't seem to be struggling.

My biggest issue is still with connecting to the TV.  It is a
Panasonic CRT and it doesn't have any digital inputs.  My motherboard
doesn't have any analogue outputs, so I'm still running on my 17" LCD
monitor.  I think I'm going to have to just go out and buy a new TV
with HDMI inputs.  I was reading a comparison of LCD vs Plasma TV's
last night and each has it pro's and con's.  I've always thought LCD
was better than plasma, but the smooth motion and cheaper prices of
the plasmas are starting to look good.  Even the 100Hz LCD's still
seem to stutter a bit with scenes where they pan across a landscape or
something like that.  Ugh!  So many decisions!

Anyway thanks to everyone who helped with recommendations.  You'll
probably see a few questions from me soon :-)


Thanks

David Kirk