Hello,

This is going to be my first Myth box and I'm doing (what I feel) is something rather simple.

I'm looking to just set up a single non digital cable feed into my Myth server and then connect to it via a software client and be able to watch TV on a few of the computers around the house. I haven't come accross any specific documentation on doing this but I assume KnoppMyth is the way to go for it.

I'm posting in the hardware forum because I'm curious as to what card would be best for me to purchase, the hardware that will be running the server is as follows;

P4 3.2
1g mem
Intel 875P chipset
Nvidia 5700
200g Maxtor IDE hd


I know there is a lot of info allready out there on the TV cards and I have looked at a good ammount of it but I', really interested in what some of you have to say as to what card would make the most sense for my application with keeping cost in mind.

One other question is, are there any front end soft clients that can be run on a nondedicated system the allow you to change the channel?

Thanks in advance for any advice or onformation.

What initially sounds simple always ends up getting complicated. You have PC clients, which is no big deal, but you want to be able to change the channel from anywhere, which is a little more tricky. I'm still too noobish to even touch that aspect of it but I'll throw in my 2 cents on the video card.

Get a Hauppauge pvr250, or if you want to lose some sleep and hair but get dual tuner support, a pvr500. Some are using the pvr150 but I can't comment as I know nothing about them.

It sounds like you have enough horsepower to do whatever you want, but let me tell you this: you WILL want more hard drive space. I know, you think 200G is plenty. I thought 120 was plenty, I thought I'd just delete stuff once a week and keep it trimmed down. Now I find myself wishing I had more space so I could rip my whole DVD collection and not have to get up and change discs or dig up what I want to watch out of the entertainment center, I have to keep a close eye on the hd space free and it's a drag.

there are ivtv commands that allow you to swap tuner input and frequency. You can script around them.

http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Ivtvctl

Keep in mind that the parameter to change channels is frequency and not channel number. you'll need to do the mapping. I do just that with the mythstreamtvLive stuff. vlc takes the frequency as well and sets the 250 appropriately.

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

Knoppmyth is definitely the way to go (if TV is all it's going to do). I have a PVR-500 in my mbe and love it. I'm actually thinking about getting another or upgrading to digital cable and get a Moto DCT-6200 so I can record from firewire.



Depending on how you do your backend should determine your system requirements. Me, I've got my backend running off of an AMD sempron 2800+ serving a couple diskless frontends - works great. If you are not planning to watch live TV/recorded programs or do any heavy DVD burning on this myth server then save that equipment for yourself and get a slightly slower chip and board. It really doesn't take the latest and greatest if you have the right TV card with built-in MPEG encoding. I would recommend an additional hard drive, 200GB is not going to last too long.

As for the clients... I just burned a few copies of R5A22 and run the diskless frontend option. This doesn't require any formatting or installing other operating systems. When you want to go back just reboot and eject CD. Your other option is to stream your recordings on the local LAN through mythweb