I'm seeing virgin media tv ads about the tivo box.
Is this stuff that mythubuntu can do?
If so what is the hardware any of you would recomend?
I understand the Tivo box has some sort of inteligence in it in that
it can suggest TV programs and what not. Not to mention the Virgin
Tivo box supports HD cable programming :-)
But from what I've read about MythTV it also seems very powerful if
you spend the time tweaking it.
The last time I was reading up about it, if you wanted to do HDTV
playback it was recommended that you had an NVidia graphics card
(something like a Geforce 8400 or higher or a GeForce 210 or higher)
which can offload the HD video decoding to the graphics card so you
can have a lower spec machine.
I believe if you want just Freeview then an Atom board with an Ion
chipset with maybe 2GB Ram and a big hard drive and some USB Freeview
sticks would suffice.
I guess really to advise what hardware you'd need depends on what you
want to do. If you wanted to you could maybe have a powerful backend
with a few tuner cards (maybe a couple of DVB-S2 Satellite tuners and
some Freeview tuners) for free to air channels and then multiple front
ends to play all back on.
Personally I am tempted to get one of these...
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/253305
It's a low power dual core Athlon II server with 1GB Ram and a 250GB
hard drive. It's small and has space for 4 drives and up to 8GB Ram.
It also has a £100 cashback offer until the end of this month.
Originally I was thinking of getting one to replace my P4 server in
the loft with something lower power and quieter but after some
thought, if I stick a Geforce 210 in there I can also use it for
MythTV as well (although due to the limited internal slots, I'd have
to use USB tuners), and finding a USB sound card with SPDIF output
which is compatible with Ubuntu seems to be a bit of a challenge.
Rob
Rob,
I think you're getting too hung up big graphics cards and big processors
and loads of drives.... :)
I've run Myth on that kind of hardware and while it works, it'll cost
you a fortune in just electricity... remember ever watt the machine uses
will cost you over £1/year... my old Myth box was 220w according to the
meter, costing over £230/year in electric alone... never mind the cost
of the machine...
While Myth can do the whole client/server thing (and it's all very
clever), it's a bit overkill for most people, especially since most TV's
have the antenna connections right next to them, it seems to make sense
to put a combined frontend/backend box under the TV, just like a
Tivo/Sky/Cable box.
My new (and by new I mean 15 months old) Myth box is a (now
discontinued) bottom of the range (even came with Linpus Linux) Acer
Revo 3600 (newer versions are available now). Single core 1.6GHz Atom
processor, 1GB RAM, 160GB laptop hard drive, onboard Nvidia ION graphics
(with HDMI out), cost £165 new. Add one MCE remote (off Ebay£15) and one
Hauppauge WinTV NOVA-TD dual Freeview USB tuner (Amazon £50). It equals
a really sweet setup!
My original big box setup used KnoppMyth (though to be fair this was
four years ago) and took about month (several hours a night) to set
everything up with hours of googling, a complete nightmare. When it was
finished it worked fine, except that due to all the tweaking to get all
that mix of hardware/software to play nice, I was stuck because I was
too scared to upgrade for fear of breaking something...
For the new box I used Mythbuntu. It took less than 30 mins, most of
which was drinking tea waiting for it to install. Everything worked out
of the box! The only issue that I had was that sound didn't work over
the HDMI lead, a quick google pointed me at the sound app, where I had
to activate a setting to do digital sound. Result! About a year later
(at the time of the local digital switchover) I had glitch when the old
USB tuner stopped working (still not sure why), so I bought the WinTV
and it's been absolutely fine since.
The MythTV setup lets you record two programmes at once (although within
limits it can record up to six at once quiet happily) while watching a
recording, it does all the season pass/series link stuff, look out for
programmes with favourite actors/directors/etc, it let's you watch the
recordings on a laptop elsewhere in the house if the kids are watching
TV, has a nice web interface for setting up recordings (can be used over
the internet with the right router setting), the EPG data is
continuously downloaded over the air - and programmes are automatically
rescheduled if needed, it can also stream video from other servers/PCs
(with minor fiddling) onto the TV, let's you keep/save TV programmes
(pull them over to a laptop and burn to DVD), and being so tiny it
attaches (with a homemade wooden bracket) to the back of the LCD TV
keeping it all looking nice and tidy!
And as a bonus it only uses 24W... saving £200/year in electric from the
old box, cheaper to run than a Sky box and no monthly bills from Sky...
:) Result!
Lee
PS. Props to the MythBuntu guys if they're listening!
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