[ubuntu-uk] Mythubuntu: what harware?

[Rob Beard]

On 08/07/11 21:27, Andres wrote:
> 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