[TriLUG] MythTV box recommendations?

[Sean Korb]

>
> At 11:57 AM 2/8/2010, you wrote
>>
>> and, typically being a Mac guy, i'm not terribly familiar with what
>> i'll need for the box itself. any recommendations or kits for starting
>> point would be immensely helpful.

I have basic cable and a dual tuner PVR500 that I've used for a few
years.  I like using my mythtv box as my central NFS server as well
and I leave it on all the time.  My front end gets turned on with the
TV and we get a lot of enjoyment from that setup.  We have wireless
Linux and Mac laptops and the frontend works on both.  I can watch TV
anywhere sort of like a Slingbox.

I used to have a dual P4 Xeon and that was adequate to compute
commercial auto-skip.  It was 2GHz and built in 2002.  When I upgraded
to a Pentium dual core 64 bit machine, my electric bill went down $10
a month and the computer room stopped being hot all the time.  Select
an energy efficient box since it will be on all the time and if you
like the commercial auto skip feature two cores are a must.  NVIDIA
cards will help offload playback to the video card and only
contaminate your kernel a little :)

Someday I'll move into the digital TV world, but I'm waiting for it to
be mostly free.

sean

-- 
Sean Korb spkorb at spkorb.org http://www.spkorb.org
'65,'68 Mustangs,'68 Cougar,'78 R100/7,'60 Metro,'59 A35,'71 Pantera #1382
"The more you drive, the less intelligent you get" --Miller
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers." -P. Picasso