I was wondering if I'm borderline on the CPU if I'm putting two PVR-150's and a Comcast/Motorola 6200 box over firewire into a PII-266 machine? It would be a backend only server and the Motorola STB might be dumping HDTV .ts streams also.

Thanks!

you may be borderline at that. The biggest concern that pops into my head is I believe that the pvr cards require pci 2.1/2 something like that, and who knows if an old board like that would have the proper support.

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Xsecrets

I seriously doubt this would work. The busses on that board probably don't have enough bandwidth to even handle the firewire stream, not even taking lack of memory bandwidth, processor speed, and lackluster IDE performance into account.

It might make a halfway decent frontend but put all your money/grunt power into the backend. It's where myth needs it to be.

afrosheen you are 100% backwards. the frontend is the one that has to have some muscle. I do however agree with you that you may run into some bus issues etc, but I can promise this system would not work as a frontend. It might as a backend.

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Xsecrets

Hi,
If you want to be able to watch any tv using the 266, (live or recorded) you will need a pvr-350 card. If you are playing music with the eye candy then it needs to be setup for "2" to lighten the load or some of your music will have the hic cups. Depends on which eye candy is being displayed.

It will run, it is linux but it will be like the little train, "it thinks it can" , just not well enough for you to enjoy.
~700 - 900 is really the low end I find for a smooth working single box setup using the pvr-350. By all means do try anyway as it helps you to learn and understand KnoppMyth more. It makes a great experimental box! If the music hic cups, just hit esc once to stop the eye candy, news is good, weather is fine, and you can learn how to set up the various features in the many menus.

Mike

Xsecrets: I fail to see where I'm 100% backwards. All the frontend is doing is playing a stream from another source and sending input to the backend. The backend, OTOH, is the one actually doing all the tuning/encoding/decoding of the video stream. Those wimpy Mac Minis, an XBox, or a lowly Via Eden can serve as frontends but would all (most likely) fail miserably as backends.

I would ask someone to back me up on this, but 1. I don't care that much and 2. the mythtv pvr hardware database http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/tiki-pvrhwdb.php says it all.

Kermee,
Your system is similar to my backend ...er...that doesn't sound quite...right...um, similar to my knoppmyth backend...heh.
PII-400
PVR-250
512RAM
80Gb IDE (boot, swap)
180Gb SCSI (cache, myth)
Tyan Tsunami s1846 ATX mobo
Firewire/USB combo PCI
PCI nic
NVidia GeForceMMX2 AGP video card
ATTO ExpressPCI PSC SCSI card
DCT-6200
Pioneer DVD-106s DVD-ROM

I just finished (sort of) doing a manual install of R5A22 (it's never really finished...too many toys, not enough time...). Since the above system is a backend-only, it manages to just barely serve its purpose. It will record two shows at once and CPU usage spikes around 38%. I can watch and record at the same time, no prob, including HD. However, post-recording commflagging shoots CPU cycles up to 45-60% for one show, 90-100% for two shows (commflagging two at the same time).
That being said, I'm very pleased with its performance. Allows me to concentrate my efforts on a killer frontend (heck, my backend almost can do HD...almost...actually, XSecrets is right on...my frontends (Mac TiBook and Dell Latitude laptop) can't do HD, not enough horsepower). So, my backend really doesn't have that much to do when I want to watch or record HD, it's the frontends that are the bottlenecks.
Good Luck!

-Bob K.

This is untrue. yes the backend does all the encoding if you are using a software card, but the question was about pvr cards, and those have hardware encoders on them, so the backend does almost nothing to record using one of these cards. The same is true of hdtv it is transmitted in mpeg2, so no encoding has to happen at all just the transfer to disk. The decoding (the most processor intensive portion) is ALWAYS done on the frontend. You can use some hardware assist with this like xvmc (nvidia/epia) or pvr350, but both have their problems.

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Xsecrets