Dear all

Objective: build a MythTV box to record TV home in Australia to watch where I work overseas.

Hardware choices...

Computer: I found a very basic Pentium 4, 1800MhZ cheap (about $200). After reading here more I think I could have got away with a lot less CPU, if all I want to do is record (using a hardware encoder)?

RAM: Its got 256Mb. I was going to double that, but from reading here I think 256Mb will be ok, for just a recorder?

TV Card: I think a Hauppauge 150 will be ok? Else I go with a 250, if I can find one. It seems the most important thing is the hardware mpeg encoding? Also, a 350 seems to be overkill?

Harddisk: I was going to get a SATA 200Gb, but now I'm wondering if a plain IDE 200Gb will be fine.

Then: install KnoppMyth, get the XML-TV download working for Australia, ensure sshd is working, think of some way to download the videos remotely (plain apache?), voila!

WDYT?

Thanks in advance
Ellers

Should be plenty, and you're not going to save that much with a lower spec machine anyway. Beware of Via chipsets on the motherboard, although this is gnerally more of an issue with Athlon based boxes.


That's fine, if you want ot play stuff back on it later 512 might be nice.


The 150 should be fine. The big benefit of the 350 is for playback.


You'll actually be far better off with a PATA drive. SATA is still iffy and at the very least requires using manual install. PATA just works.


I sure hope you've got a VERY fat pipe at home, because feeding video is really bandwidth intensive. With the default settings a PVR card recording is over 2Gb/hour. Even with my cable modem (whch various speed tests claim is running at T1 speeds) it'd take ~3 hours to download that much data, and upload speeds are substantially slower.

Thanks TJC!

Thats great advice, much appreciated.

Especially interesting about PATA. I'll do that then for sure.

Bandwidth: yeah, I'd worried about that. I figure I can dumb down the resolution and let it download overnight. Hopefully I can find a way to balance bandwith and quality. Thanks for the heads-up.

The biggest advantage of the hardware mpeg2 encoders is that you end up with a nice format for offloading onto dvds and very minimal recording requirements, leaving cpu for playback and other stuff. The downside is they're expensive, and the file sizes are big, probably too big for you to download easily several continents away.

I'd think you'd be better suited with a simple cheap software tuner card and encoding it to mpeg4. Mpeg4 files are going to be half the size or less of an mpeg2. The mythtv howto claims you can encode a 480x480 stream with a 733 mhz processor, so it sounds like your backend only system could handle it ok, especially if you're not running X or doing anything else with it.

Being in Aussie like me, you may want to look at a DVB-T card instead of the 150 as this will record the MPEG-2 stream directly off the air.

_________________
Girkers

Thanks for the awesome tips

Girkers - I was considering a Compro DVB-T300 as its easier to find than the Hauppauge -- d'ya reckon that'll work ok with MythTV/KnoppMyth?

misterflibble - good tips Given that I've got a P4 anyway, and I don't need to run X or anything, perhaps it does make sense to do the software encode. Is it straightforward to configure to encode in mpeg4?

Do you have any other (Australia-specific) recommended cards? (apart from Hauppauge which I'm having trouble getting.)

Thanks!

I was wondering about watching live tv remotely.
Im visiting my family 200 miles away soon and want to watch my Myth Box, is there a way to cut down the bandwidth of the liveTV to a seperate frontend so that it will work with the 400k/s upload i have on DSL?

If so I can use my epia 5000 mini-itx as a frontend at my parents house and watch all my subbed cable channels (cable isnt even available where they live) while im there.

If I cant stream live TV over DSL, what transcode settings should I use to convert shows so they can be played to a seperate frontend over the net?

I don't know how to stream tv personally - but I know it can be done in some mysterious way in real time with existing hardware:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041028.html

I think livetv is gonna be impossible for several reasons. First, Mythtv is designed to run over a local network and not designed for high latency or connection timeouts or anything you get over the Internet, so you're going to have choppy playback, if it works at all. Secondly your bandwidth is just not going to be high enough to send anything but the fuzziest video in realtime. That tv2me thing claims it requires a 512 kilobits upstream connection and preferably a 768, and they now seem to be using the H.264 codec which is way more compressed than mpeg4 even. Third, most bandwidth providers don't even give you what they claim, you can get short spikes of the top speed, but then it throttles back, especially on uploading.