MythTV for Underpowered CPUs

For my own reference. Good information for putting together a PVR on an old machine.

Greg's MythTV for Underpowered CPUs Page

We have a 400MHz K6-2 just sitting in the corner that we might be able to turn in to a PVR with the Hauppauge PVR-350 card and its hardware acceleration. The trick will be keeping the cost under $300, otherwise it's cheaper to go with Bell. The Haupp card goes for about $170 US on eBay (about $215 Cdn).

The do-your-own PVR does have advantages over Bell's. We could save the stuff we record, put it on the server, and burn it to DVD for archival purposes. Bell's PVR also has advantages, though. It's more integrated all in one unit and more convenient.

My concerns about this machine are the hard drive, the memory, and sound card.

The hard drive we have sitting around is a 5400 rpm 30G model. That would give us about 13-14 hours of TV recording, but I'm not sure if it's fast enough to keep up with the video input/output.

It has 256M of memory, but I was thinking of moving that module to the kitchen computer, which would leave the 400 with 128M of memory. Might be a bit tight.

The sound card is an old ISA SoundBlaster 16. Not sure if the ISA bus is capable of keeping up with the bandwidth requirements. However, this might be a non-issue, as I think the Haupp card handles its own audio. Have to check in to that.

If we start upgrading these parts in addition to buying an encoder/decoder card, the price is going to go above $300 quickly.

One thing about the Haupp card is that it has a TV tuner on it that we don't need since we have satellite. As for hardware, we could use the video card in Norah's computer if we replaced that card (could be upgraded for all of $30). However, I don't think that card has the hardware assistance. Most sites say we'd want about a 1GHz processor for software encoding/decoding. But that's a computer upgrade, which means lots more money.

Interesting to think about, though.