[TriLUG] Building a MythTV box...

James Brigman jbrigman at nc.rr.com
Sun Mar 20 16:41:16 EST 2005


Doug;

I'm building a MythTV myself. I have not yet finished because I'm
particular about the case (and struggling with it - so many BAD desktop-
format cases out there!) Anyway, some quick points and then some links:

Here's an anandtech link to get you started:
http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2190&p=1

And my favorite vendor:
http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/products_id/138/ref=cnet
(NO financial or pecuinary connection to this vendor...)
They have vid cards, cases, etc. and focus on the HTPC builder.

> Here is the basic machine I'm considering.
> 
> I'm considering recycling an athlon duron 800 with 512 mb ram.

Gentoo is a good distro for this because it's "clean". You want a
minimum of parasitic daemons like sendmail or cups to deal with. 512MB
RAM oughta be OK. You are going to want a decent vid card with an "S-
video out" port, and of course, a TV that can accept S-video. If you
don't have such a TV already, you'll have to buy a converter box for PC-
to-TV. TigerDirect has these in abundance.

> The machine by itself would be too slow so,  I'm going to buy a tv card, 
> probably a hauppage (sp?) wintv 250 or 350. 
> Has anyone seen any benefit of the 350 over the 250 in practice? 
>     Any other tv tuners people have been impressed with to use for this 
> purpose?

The 150 is a new card with a good DSP.
The 250 includes FM tuner capability (which I desire)
The 500 has dual 250's on one card. 
I think I read somewhere don't buy the 350, it's an older DSP?

I have looked with lust upon the cheaper Pinnacle and AvMedia TV tuner
cards (TigerDirect, $80, no rebate) but don't know a soul who's using
them. The MythTV folks stick pretty close to the Pinnacle cards

MythTV builders who write about their experience are only using the
Hauppage 250 - it's got a fantastic "Connexant" DSP that does the
hardware-based encoding and makes using a Duron 800 a feasible
proposition. 

The 250 comes with a remote control that some people are using just fine
with MythTV. The 500 does not come with a remote, I plan to use a
wireless keyboard instead.

I got my own "500" card from, of all places, www.cdw.com. There's also a
vendor who specializes in PVR hardware for PC builders, with very
competitive prices. 

Our own T. Lovelace has gotten a Pinnacle card working under Linux:
http://wtl.wayfarer.org/bt848.php

Be Careful! There's a lot of stuff in TV-tunerland that people don't
like. I was brokenhearted to learn my favorite vendor, ATI, has really
fallen behind in tuner cards: their TV-wonder series is not in use very
much by the MythTV crowd, and those who have used ATI products are using
only a small subset, not the older All-In-Wonder cards, which is a real
shame. The early All-in-wonder cards were great hardware plagued by
mediocre and non-functional software. 

> I'll be adding a larger hard drive, probably 200gb range.

200GB is a good size.  SATA if you've not bought it yet, ATA-133 is OK
with the 8MB cache, 7200RPM models. I hear people talk about 80GB drives
or 160's, but think of a DVD: 4 to 7GB of video and features. If you
want to rip your own DVD collection to disk (and sell the originals on
ebay to pay for your media PC, or if you've conned the wife unit with
this line...:-) you'll need at least 200GB, probably 300 would be
nicer. 

> A wireless nic so I can save some of the shows I want to keep to a 
> larger file server and to grab the xmltv feed.

That's ambitious and a very nice idea. Would be interested in hearing
how that performs. You'll be looking at the "pre-N" routers, then? Even
over USB 2.0 (450Mbps) you're looking at 13-16 minutes to move 2 hrs of
video of reasonable quality and sound.

I'm looking at 100mbps or even gig ethernet. I'd like the ability to
keep things on a big server and access them from the PVR system. But
you've got my attention with wireless..

Here are some links I've found useful in my research. They helped me
narrow down the card to choose. No one has any opinions about the
motherboards, CPU's or drives, everyone just uses what they have, it's
the Vid capture cards they get picky about. 

http://freevo.sourceforge.net/hardware.html
http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2004/09/anand_builds_a_.html
http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2190&p=1
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/remotes.php
http://home.comcast.net/~alf_park/mythtv.html
http://gatos.sourceforge.net/supported_cards.php

JKB




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