Hello,

I was hoping some of you more experienced users wouldn't mind taking a look at what I have lined up to put together as my myth box:

AOPEN MX4LR
WD 40gb IDE
ASUS 16x DVD-ROM
Pentium 4 1.8
Chaintech 7.1 Soundcard
ASUS V9400-X/TD GEFORCE MX 4000

Does anyone foresee any problems I might run into?

Thanks a lot.

Oh, and 2 sticks of 256mb of Hynix el-crapo DDR2700.

I think you need a tuner. Do you have one in mind? I suggest a PVR-250.

Andrew Lynch

I have no experience with that motherboard, but the CPU would be sufficient in an SDTV front-end or an SDTV/HDTV back-end. DVD resolution is almost identical to NTSC resolution, so playback of DVDs shouldn't tax your CPU. You can always use libmpeg2 to offload some of the burden onto your video card.

If the Chaintech 7.1 soundcard is an AV-710, it's the same card we use in Dragon. See the Dragon release notes (follow the link in my signature) for some information on the state of the current driver. You may or may not experience the one second of silence in analog mode.

The video card is probably compatible since it uses an nVidia chipset, but it's always a good idea to do some searching to make sure

I've never had an HDD or an optical drive be incompatible with Linux, so those should work, too.

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I would recommend getting the biggest HD you can afford. Only because once you get MythTV up and running and you realize what it can truly do, you're going to want to load it up with TONS of media. My 120GB HD is starting to feel small after loading it with MP3's, AVI's, pictures, recordings, etc. Just my personal experiance.

I'll second the "more disk!" recommendation. Especially since the sweet spot for $/Gb is now out in the 250-320Gb area. For maybe twice the cost you get about 8 times the disk space. Of course you could always reserve the 40Gb drive for your boot disk (PATA not SATA!) and get one or more great big drives on sale. With rebates you can often get the cost down below $0.40/Gb.

Might as well get a PVR-150 (non-MCE), substantially cheaper and these days, unless you find an older PVR-250, not really any harder to get working. People have exactly the same problems with the newer PVR-250 model 980s as they do with the PVR-150 model 1045s.

Heck, for the price of the PVR-150, you may as well buy 2. That way, you can watch and record at the same time or record 2 different shows. I'm planning on buying a PVR-150 as a 2nd tuner to my PVR-250. Like tjc said, it takes about the same to get a 150 to work as it does a 250.

I should have mentioned this at the beginning, but I don't actually intend on recording any TV programs unless I can steal my neighbour’s cable. I don't want to pay for TV – I hate 99% of what is on the air. I only intend on playing music and playing DVDs, both locally and remotely. I just want to reference my main machine and play most everything from their expect of course physical CDs and DVDs.

I understand about not wanting to pay for cable. Don't underestimate playing CD's and DVD's from Myth. Unless you have a DVD player that can play anything (like my $40 Mintek), playing DVD-R's on the Myth box is extremely handy. And you can always rip your CD's to the HD for future reference