[mythtvnz] My New Setup

[Brett Miller]

David
The mobo pictures (from Gigabyte website) show Dsub VGA connector in the 
rear IO panel ?
Can use that with some of the last of the CRTs that were designed for 
use with set top boxes.

Bit late now but.. the ION chipset would have been way better solution IMHO.
The price of ION chipset mobo should be collapsing as this is obsolete 
with ION2 GT210 released.

I guess a very powerful CPU could make up for the 8200 but is not as 
efficient/quiet.
An i5 quad core seems to work okay doing h264 playback with most of the 
load on one core.
What is an AMDII-250 ?
Does it compare to the power efficiency of the dual core (atom & 
pentium) & quad core Intel offerings ?

You can still plug in a half height GT210/220/240 GPU to fix the h/w 
capability later.

IMO Plasma is better with motion..
Need to be very careful with exact models if Panasonic.

B.

On 8/05/2010 9:40 a.m., David Kirk wrote:
> 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
>
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