MythTV – My Setup

I’ve had a few people asking me about my setup of mythTV so here it is in a more persistent form, and better explained.

What is mythTV

I’m going to assume you already know about MythTV if not check out its site here and the wiki entry here

I’m currently running my setup with a dedicated back-ends and 2 front-ends which I’ll describe below.

Back-end

Hardware is as follows:

• Pentium III 450Mhz
• 384MB SDRAM
• 2 Hauppauge Nova-T DVB cards [1]
• 250GB SATA disk on a pci controller
• 40GB IDE disk

I’m not sure what the minimum specs are for mythtv, but alot of people are surprised I’m able to run it smoothly on a low powered machine like this. Commercial flagging takes its toll on this rig though, so you best leave it off you record quite a few shows. My average load watching liveTV + a recordings is around 20%. This machine is running Ubuntu Dapper and is due for an upgrade to accept more tuner cards (need more PCI slots, as the SATA, NIC and GFX use up the other 3.

Front-ends

I have 2 front-ends, the 1st is a dedidicated EPIA 1500EN mini-itx board[2] with 512MB DDR2 running Ubuntu Feisty. This has a custom compiled graphics driver to allow for TV-OUT over S-Video (since the version I needed wasn’t in the repo when I built it). Making use of the hardware MPEG2 decoding enables very smooth playback without much cpu usage. I also have digital sound output working is great. The connection for this is via a scart cable after passing through my cinema amp. This machine makes use of an ATI Remote Wonder II for its remote control.

My other front-end is my desktop PC, this is a AMD 3000XP+ Athlon with 1GB DDR running Ubuntu Feisty. This generally plays back fine, how-ever the cpu load is quite high, around 80% which can sometimes produce a few frames to freeze/skip.

Out of the 2 front-ends I have, I’d recommend getting the mini-itx board (not sure what the cheaper boards are like as I can’t afford them to test) as it has these advantages

• Quieter to run, you can even get a fan less version.
• Cheaper to run, since they need a lot less watts (<30 I believe at full load) which will soon added up if its left on 24/7
• Has digital sound/5.1 surround/TV-OUT on board, no extra components to buy
• Small foot print, so fits in well under your TV. Mine is in a case around the size of a 1U DVD player.

Whilst setting up my mythTV I used guidelines from this site, which is quite helpful here.

[1] Hauppauge Nova-T DVB card

[2] VIA EPIA EN Mini-ITX mainboard

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