Best hardware for a small and silent MythTV box?

[[H]omer]

Hi all,

I want to build a system that is good enough to do the following:


Watch and record Freeview, with EPG type menus
Watch and record Sky, through a S-Video link
Watch and rip DVDs of any region and any colour standard
Play and rip audio CDs
Transcode audio (AAC) and video (MPEG2 and H264)
Play stored multimedia such as mp3, H264, divx etc
Play rudimentary (desktop/emulator type) games
Read Email
Surf the Web
Organise photos and view slideshows
Sync with digital cameras and DAPs


The only hardware specs I must insist on, is that it is virtually invisible - i.e. as small and quiet as possible. Money no object. Oh, and it has to have WiFi (preferably 108Mb/s).

If it comes to a choice between power and heat dissipation, I'll take the cool and quiet system every time, and I really don't want a huge beast of a machine.

So ... what's the best hardware for the job?

TIA.

[six5tring]

Right, I'm not a myth expert (use media center myself). But from what I've gather you can run clients and servers. This means that you can have a noisy server with all your tuner cards in and then have a silent little ITX unit with the tv.

Your alterative is to make a higher spec HTPC that "blends" into your setup using a HTPC case. So your not going ergh look at that horrible beige box and instead ooooohh.. look at my lovely pc! (htpc cases.. http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/Kustom_PCs_Shop_HTPC_Cases_96.html)

Sure brumster will be able to shed more light on the whole client server thing but this I think is what I would pottentially suggest.

I will just quickly at that I have a nearly silent system see spec in sig (HTPC/ITX)

Six

[Danny Boy]

You might want to conider the epia sp 1300. Thats what im currently using for my htpc running windows mce 2005. Its a very small board being an itx form factor, but via have packed it with functionality. Its got hardware mpeg2 and mpeg4 acceleration built in to the onboard graphics which puts it up to the job. The fact that its only a 1.3Ghz C3 is a bit of a drawback but it can still cope with the job at hand. I use mine with a usb freeview adapter and it can watch and record tv fine. It also works well with the hauppage pvr 150/350 so you can get that precious s-video input for recording sky. The limiting factor is the one pci slot. You can either have a pci tv tuner and use the onboard graphics or go for a beefier graphics card and usb tuners. Personally, i'd opt for the better graphics card but its just not an option for me.

But that may be smaller than you want to go, in which case you might as well opt for a bigger motherboard that can have a much faster processor, I think you will notice the performance increase.

[stdRaichu]

If money is really is no object;

Set up a dedicated frontend system under the TV using a flash drive for a boot device (a 16MB or smaller SD or CompactFlash card will work fine) and mount the drives over NFS. Audigy sound card and either onboard GFX (a la my TV box) or a passively cooled nVidia 6xxx and a passively cooled PSU. Use 512MB of RAM on a Pentium-M based system. Pay a shedload for a fancy case - preferably one that'll take a standard ATX PSU for your sake. Don't bother fighting an EPIA and their crappy MPEG2 acceleration; an nVidia will give you HD content playback today. My vote would be with Gentoo for an OS but I imagine FC4 or Ubuntu would be just as good.

Chuck all the important stuff into a backend system. Workstation/server grade motherboard with a dual core processor. 1-2GB RAM and 500GB+ of storage, preferably RAID 1 or 5. Two or more DVB-T cards and a gigeth link to your frontend. Chuck this noisy box into the attic where it can be admined via SSH for all eternity. If you already have a server box this is a perfect excuse to convert it to Linux, upgrade and consolidate. All you need is an ethernet cable to link them together. If you really do insist in WiFi then you need a Prism or Intel chipset to get reliable open-source drivers*, but trust me: WiFI wasn't built for high-bandwidth multimedia playback like DVD and h264. I've even seen frame dropouts on Super G connections 6ft away from the transmitter.

If you want to read email, you need a high-def screen (which usually means LCD in this day and age); I'm about to buy a Philips set that does 13xx something x 768 and accepts DVI input. Not even the best standard def (800 x 600 if you're lucky, and a very fuzzy 800 x 600 at that) will let you read 14pt text without reaching for the magnification button on your VGA->TV convertor box, or you could always set up a dual display system with a small monitor for things like email, with the TV being displayed on the TV.

If you really don't want two systems, just get an Asus A8N VM-CSM and chuck and X2 3800 in it as it's the best of both worlds until Conroe comes out. If you find you need more graphical grunt for OGL games you can chuck a PCIe video card in it.

*I'm not a huge expert on wirless on Linux (I've used too much wireless on Windows to bother even contempating it for a reliable OS) so you may be able to get away with other chipsets these days

[[H]omer]

Hmmm, some interesting ideas here.

I've already got a backend server for stuff like IMAP, HTTP, etc, but it's probably not up to the job of MM tanscoding, and although I could build a box for the job - I really don't want a mess of cables all over the house, and like you said WiFi isn't up to MPEG2 etc.

So I'd prefer a one-box solution.

I'm currently biased towards AMD (never seen Pentium D in action) since I know they have good performance but don't suffer cooling problems like the P4. One of my boxes is an Epia 5000, and I'd have to agree that their performance is not great, but then things have moved on since then, and I haven't seen more modern Via stuff in action - are you saying that their new stuff is not really good enough for DVD playback? Or is it that, say, transcoding from MPEG2 to H264 is going to be dog slow?

As far as gaming is concerned ... I don't - not really. I am considering an XBox360 or (later) a PS3, and I hear that either of these will make an excellent extender, although I don't know how this fits in to MythTV rather than MCE. I'll probably never bother OGL gaming on a PC - never liked the idea of a) wasting HD space installing massive games or b) messing around with audio/video drivers. With consoles, you just throw in the disc and play - pretty much the way I think it should be.

So a mid-end Athlon64, onboard graphics, max memory, big but quiet hard drive, WiFi, and some kind of outboard TV/MPEG VIVO solution - PCI or USB?

That Asus board or similar looks like a good solution.

I'll research this some more and tell you how it worked out.

Thx.

[six5tring]

The asus board is lovely :) I run one and it runs like a dream! - six

[stdRaichu]

Indeed, that Asus is a corker for a frontend.

There's nothing wrong with using an EPIA for a frontend, just beware that a) the drivers can be a bit of a pain and b) they're utterly useless for any heavy work, such as transcoding, and I'm not sure if they'll be able to cope with HD content. My Asus frontend just chews through things though (although x264 is slow even on my workstation). FWIW the onboard GFX on the Asus board are enough to run even things like UT2004 at a low res, low detail setting, so if you're not planning on gaming you can concentrate on pretty OGL screensavers instead :D

Don't confuse a Pentium-M with a Pentium 4; whilst the P4's are power hungry space heaters that can't outperform Athlon64's, the Pentium-M's are corking little chips. Lots of grunt and use very little power. Their downside is that they're expensive and the costs for the motherboards are utterly outrageous. If you can wait awhile you could even supplant it for a Core Duo (ugh, horrible name) or a Conroe-based chip, but any AMD will do you fine for now.

I really can't stress the importance of taking as much stuff out of your frontend box as possible - if you can afford it, upgrade your backend server into a box you can fit a shedload of SATA HDD's into plus a goodly amount of TV cards, else I believe you'll quickly find yourself constrained by the limitations of trying to stuff two tuner cards and a bunch of hard drives into the pretty little box under your TV. If you're positive you'll never need more than one tuner and 500GB of storage, I'lljust tell you you have yet to fully appreciate how much a PVR will change your viewing habits :D Heck, I'm planning on building another 4U file server I can deck out with even more HDD's just so I can store more TV content.

I've not used any USB based DVB units, as I prefer internal cards to reduce the amount of clutter - I already have too many cables around the back of my TV!

[six5tring]

I've not used any USB based DVB units, as I prefer internal cards to reduce the amount of clutter - I already have too many cables around the back of my TV!

I use a terratec USB freeview tuner on my ITX rig and it works a treat and is pretty small. I'm still hoping that M$ will bring out a MCE server like the myth servers. There's been word of MCE desktop extenders for ages but nothing seems to have happened :(

six