[wplug] MythTV

[Patrick Wagstrom]

On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 23:12 +0000, Michael Semcheski wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> A person I work with and myself were thinking about setting up some 
> MythTV boxes.
> 
> I was wondering if anyone could give me some good recommendations on 
> hardware for them.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike

Well, if you feel like waiting until the June GUM, I'll be giving a talk
on it there.  But you're probably a little anxious, so here's a brief
rundown of what you'll want to look at:

For standard def TV:

Minimum of about an Athlon 600 (I have an Athlon 700 that works fine)
256 Megs of RAM
as much hard disk as possible
TV Tuner Card (Hauppauge Win TV PVR-250 work best, hardware MPEG
encoder, come with a remote)
TV Out video card (NVidia 5200's seem pretty popular, I use a Matrox
Millenium G400 with no difficulty)


For high def TV:

Fastest processor you can get (it takes serious horsepower for HDTV)
512 Megs of RAM (commercial flagging takes more ram)
even more hard disk space
PCHdtv card (see http://www.pchdtv.com/)
TV Out video card with HDTV (Nvidia 5200's do this too)


You'll want to order your PCHdtv card before July 1 when they become
illegal to sell (yay for the broadcast flag).

Also, you might want to consider picking up an XBox for a front end.
They're a lot nicer looking on the eyes than a big ol gray box next to
the TV.

If there are folks that are interested, we might want to do a bulk order
of the PcHDTV cards to secure a volume discount.  Let me know if you're
interested and we'll work out the details.

--Patrick