MythTV … my beginning

9, Jun, 2009

I’ve always wanted a MythTV setup. The feature list and capabilities are a geek’s dream, and couch potato’s necessity. Looks like I could kill two birds with one stone here. Myself the geek, and The Boss (my girlfriend) being the re-run queen.

It’s not that I’ve never played with MythTV, we just never had a worthwhile tuner. We have a Pinnacle DC30 Pro, and an old Truevision Bravado 1000. These are hardware mjpeg capture cards. Great for capturing home movies, and VHS, not really ideal for continuous TV capture. In the box of spares we also have some non Linux supported hardware mpeg cards (DVexplore chipset). Over the years I’ve used various BT8×8 TV tuners, but could never get the results I wanted out of them.

While looking for some spare graphics cards at a website, I saw a deal on some IVTV supported cards for $25. These were OEM PVR-150 models. Decided to get 2 of them. At the very least, I’ll end up with 2 hardware mpeg capture devices natively supported by Linux. For some reason I’m a sucker for old cheap hardware.

With the IVTV cards, MythTV becomes I/O bound before CPU bound. This means I can get by running the Backend on modest hardware. That’s where I ran into a dilemma. Just how modest of a machine can I get by with? A peek in my closest reviles a mass amount of spare parts, cpus, motherboards …. I’ve gotten rid of the really old stuff (everything pre Slot1). There’s a few perfectly working barebones setups. Slot1, Sockets 370,423,478 for Intel, only a single Socket A/462 and two really nice DFI LanParty UT Socket 754’s.

The DFI’s were moved to the closest after our last round of upgrades. There’s nothing wrong with these setups. They’re just a little dated compared to everything else we’re running.

Pros -
The two Sempron 3000+s are actually 64bit compatible, and have SSE3. Google and Wikipedia tell me these are not extremely common Semprons.
DFI motherboard - these are great looking motherboards. And I don’t just mean the colors. Full ATX, 5 PCI slots, dual IDE controler plus 4 SATA ports, gigabit NIC …

Once the TV Cards arrive, I’ll install Slackware64, and finally make the journey into MythTV.

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