[TriLUG] mythtv ramblings and a questions about december mythtv presentation

[Ken Mink]

I just finished building a MythTV box a couple of months ago. I'm now
using it full time. I'm very happ with it and rarely switch over to my
TiVo.

I'm using a 2600 Barton processor(overkill) and 512MB RAM. I bought a
Samsung SP160N HD. The Samsung drives are QUIET. I mean I thought the
drive was DOA when I installed it because I couldn't even hear it spin
up. The motherboard is an ASUS A7N8X-VM/400. I'm using it's built-in
Geforce4 w/tv-out and it's built-in sound. I'm also using a Hauppauge
PVR-250 as a tuner.

I went with FC3 as a base and used the ATRPMS repostitory for the myth
installation. There's a great how-to for installing MythTV on FC. As
long as you read and follow it carefully, you'll have MythTV up and
running in no time.

As for your question about the PVR-250 vs 350. The 350 has it's own
tv-out capabilities. This includes a built-in mpeg decode. Both cards
have encoders. The theory is that with a 350, the card does both the
encoding and decoding and your cpu doesn't have to get involved. From
what I've read, the 350's tv-out can be a pain to configure. On the
myth-users list, I see a lot of people that have 350s, but don't use
it's output capabilities.

Good Luck,
Ken

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:50:02 -0500, Myrhillion <lug at blackwizard.net> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have recently gotten interested in building a mythtv box.
> I checked my trilug messages and found there was a meeting in December
> which featured mythtv.
> Drats, I've missed my opportunity.
> 
> Does anyone know if the presentation is available online somewhere?
> I'd like to discuss what people have for hardware too.
> 
> Here is the basic machine I'm considering.
> 
> I'm considering recycling an athlon duron 800 with 512 mb ram.
> I'm thinking gentoo or a debian based distro like ubuntu for the OS.
> 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?
> I'll be adding a larger hard drive, probably 200gb range.
> 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.
> This will also make it simple to keep downstairs with the stereo tv etc..
> 
> Doug Taggart
> 
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