[ale] Best processor for MythTV?

[Calvin Harrigan]

Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> Charles Shapiro wrote:
>> Hey man, after your astounding presentation at ALE in April I was 
>> inspired to start building my own mythTV box.  The Grand Plan is to 
>> change my wife's  TV viewing habits so that they intrude less into my life.
>>
>> I've acquired a  Shuttle "Zen" ST62K XPC barebones ( 
>> http://sys.us.shuttle.com/ModelsK.aspx) and I'm now wondering what 
>> processor to put into it. Money is not as important to me as cooling. 
>> I'd also like it to have enough muscle to do HDTV when the Dread Day of 
>> HDTV Reckoning comes.   After I get the machine running I'll use 
>> KnoppMyth for the install.
>>
>> I figure on maxing out the memory (heck, it's cheap), and starting out 
>> with a 40-gb hard drive I have lyin' around the house. If my wife takes 
>> to this thing, I'll probably actually spend money on the hard-drive 
>> part. And of course I was gonna get a Hauppauge PVR 350 for the actual 
>> video encoding/decoding stuff. I have no current plans to add on the 
>> khoul hi-tech bellz & whistles Jesse demonstrated. Unless, of course, I 
>> get real ambitious..
>>  
>> Your thoughts?
> 
> 
> Shortly after that meeting, the mythtv developers announced that support
> inside myth for the PVR 350's hardware decoder is deprecated. I highly
> recommend going with a PVR-150 + Nvidia 5200, or PVR-500 + Nvidia 5200
> combination. I also have an Nvidia 6200, but they can be finicky, especially
> when used in conjunction with an 8X AGP interface (4X seems to work fine though).
> 
> Actually, I've been using HDTV with a similar combination for a few months
> now, and while it works fine for SDTV, I firmly believe that dedicated,
> separate frontends are the way to go for HDTV in the future. This separation
> lowers in-living room noise, raises reliability (because the frontend can
> crash all it wants without bringing the backend with it), improves playback
> quality (nvidia solutions work, but they tend to stutter, use lots of CPU,
> fail to do bob deint properly, or some combination of these), lowers heat and
> thus wear and tear on your CPU and HDD, and improves usability (because you
> can have a frontend for each TV).
> 
> There are many dedicated SDTV options currently available, some of
> which I touched on at the meeting, and a few HDTV options as well. I'm
> personally going to be adding my own hardware to the mix by building and
> selling custom dedicated SDTV frontends starting at about $350 and HDTV
> frontends starting at about $400, complete with remote control. Expect
> these to become available either at the end of this month, or beginning
> of next.
> 
> Hope that helps. Feel free to ask me anything.
> 
> 
Do you have a website yet? Will you have one?