[mythtvnz] New motherboard

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:40:54 +1200, you wrote:

>On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:23:17 Graeme Woollett wrote:
>> It depends on which cards PCI or PCI-E and the video card (single or
>> double width) you have.  Is it an FE only or BE/FE?
>> I was caught out with a M-ATX Gigabyte board that had an available PCI-E
>> slot for my HVR-2200 only to find that the end of the 2200 hit the
>> memory slots.  With older M-ATX boards you lose the PCI-E slot if you
>> put in a double width GPU.  Newer boards you will lose a PCI slot.
>> Although large, an ATX M/B gives you the safety buffer of more slot
>> combinations.
>> I get the feeling with the grunt required for quality de-interlacing of
>> 1080i a silent box is getting pretty hard to achieve.  My box sits in
>> the laundry and is connected to my TV with a 10m HDMI cable, so in the
>> lounge it is truly silent.
>> 
>> More information about your setup i.e DVB-T/S etc. would help.
>
>Current:
>Motherboard: Asus A8N-VM CSM
>Case: Sirius YYA211
>CPU: Athlon 64 3200
>Dual Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE
>
>Currently don't have Freeview or Sky so just normally free to air channels but 
>would like to get Freeview sometime over the next year or two.

I put an Asus Bravo 220 in my MythTV box, which has a motherboard that
is slightly more modern than yours (Asus M2NPV-VM with Nvidia 6150
GPU).  The Bravo 220 is a silent Nvidia GT220 card, and it does all
the higher interlace modes needed.  It takes two slots, so I lost the
PCI slot next to the PCIe x 16 slot.  That seems to be the best way to
update an older motherboard - the processor power needed for
FreeviewHD is needed in the GPU, not the CPU.

I also increased the RAM to 2 Gibytes, so that I could run two
mythcommflag processes at once (one per CPU core) on HD video files.
Due to losing the PCI slot, I moved the Hauppauge TD-500 dual DVB-T
card to my mother's MythTV box and am now using three USB DVB-T tuners
for FreeviewHD.  I have also kept on adding hard disk storage, as HD
1080i video from TV One and TV3 takes up to 5.3 Gibytes for a one hour
program (plus my 4 minutes standard postroll).

An Athlon 64 3200 should be fine for recording as many channels as you
need, but if you want to run transcoding on everything it will be a
problem.  It should be able to do mythcommflag on everything for you,
only on one program at a time, and it will be running the CPU hot for
a fair part of each day.  A more modern CPU will probably cost less on
your electricity bill to run.