[TriLUG] Myth TV - need some pointers

[Don Jerman]

On 9/21/07, Byarlay, Wayne A. <wab at purdue.edu> wrote:
[...]
>        IR Blaster - you may find yourself needing one of these strange
> devices. Its purpose is to send signals to a cable box or satellite
> receiver box that the OS cannot communicate with, but must direct
> control to. The setup for them is confusing to me but I'm somewhat
> noob-ish and thus gave up ever having an IR blaster. It is needed

This is needed if you're going to have HBO or other pay-channels.  If
you're just going for basic you don't need it.  The Microsoft mce
device comes with 2 but I haven't got them working (as I don't need
it).

>        Hard Drive - No brainer: Buy the biggest you can afford. But
> mount it as a separate filesystem, and then look online for which
> filesystem is the FASTEST. Some say that EXT3 is not good for fast
> video?

Quiet is important here too.  JFS and XFS have good performance with
large files.  EXT3 is good for speed too, except it's slow to delete
large files.  MythTv has a "slow delete" option that reduces file-size
in steps prior to delete, just for Ext2/Ext3.