I've read through the hardware section of the mythTV documentation a bit, and I don't see much info on what the minimum requirements are for just a frontend. I have an amd k6-2/400 that I'm wondering if I could use. Right now it only has 96 megs of ram, but if the processor is fast enough to run a frontend, I'd be willing to spend the money on more.

Anyone have experiences to share about running frontends with slower cpu's?

Well that's the problem everyone wants the frontend to have low cpu, however it is the frontend that needs more cpu cause it does the decoding. You could more easily get away with less cpu on the backend if you have pvr cards.

so basically the minum requirements are minumum requirements for a frontend, and if you are using pvr mpeg2 cards a k62 will not come close to cutting it. with mpeg4 you will probably still get skipping cause the k62 just does not have enough processing power.

The only low end frontend that may come close with some tinkering is the via based solutions since it has hardware mpeg2 (and mpeg4 on the just anounced boards) decoding, but it is rather a pain to get working.

Good point, I really hadn't thought of it that way! Do you then think that with enough ram and a pvr-250, that k6-2/400 would make a decent backend?

Also...I'm still curious, what would you think the minimum requirements would be for a frontend?

It all depends on what you are doing. If you do have a pvr card then the requirements are higher, I would say 1.5G or so. a 1G nemiah if you could get the mpeg2 decoder working. if you are doing mpeg4 then an 800 duron or so could work.

I would think if you had a pvr card and weren't doing any transcoding or anything a k62 would probably work fine as a backend, because it's almost all I/O.