Posted on 12/06/2005 10:13:13 AM PST by wolfman
Was thinking of starting with this bundle. I'm not a gamer, so the Celeron should do me fine. Is this a good base to start from?
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1697047&sku=MBM-PM8MV-340
i'm running three emachines in the office now, 2 on xp and 1 on kubuntu. all three needed a memory upgrade but other than that they run great. emachine unlike dell and HP generally run very common parts so every distro i've tried works great without the need to find drivers. i've got one gaming machine built with highend parts but for normal crap including low end server stuff i can't build them anywheres close to price i can find emachines for.
best of all emachines install disc uses ghost so i can wipe an XP machine clean in under 20 minutes. i really love that.
I gues i've just been lucky with them..it's been 18
months or more since i bought one from them. but
all the ones i've gotten, are running solid.
I like the Burn-in Guarantee they give.
If you are that comfortable with Linux, then you shouldn't have any trouble at all.
Yes, you will need either digital cable or satellite. I have DirecTV, and Myth pulls the program guide from there....I have no experience with cable, but a friend uses cable and it works fine. No phone line neccesary. All info comes directly from the signal source.
OK to pick your brain a on a few more things -
I know costs can vary but say you bought a single video-capture board that did the digital encoding in hardware - but also including the case, the cpu, the memory, the HD, the video card etc. etc. how much are we talking roughly? It seems like you could easily get into the $500 - $1000 range for a functionality that I lease a box from my cable company for about $5 a month that is small and relatively quiet. I realize that having an open system has numerous advantages - basicallly you own the 1's and 0's unlike in the cable model but still :)
Also, say I have digital cable - so I still have a STB between the cable and the mythTV right? So how does mythTV select channels on the STB when it wants to record a certain channel at a certain time?
Thanks.
Okay....first off, I am running my Myth box on a P-III 933 Mhz, with 512 MB RAM and a 60GB HDD. It was my main computer before I bought another one about a year ago. I did nothing to it except to install an ATI-AIW video card, which was in an even older system I had. I could have bought or built a similar system in the $300-$400 range. There is no need for anything fancy. The only 'must-have's' are the A/V in/out capable video card, and a minimum P-III processor or any other processor that isn't chopped.
The Myth box becomes your programming source. In essence, it gets all of it's info from your cable or satellite tuner, but it takes over all functionality. The guide, programming, info, etc is taken from your tuner and incorporated into the Myth system, and will therefore be run completely by the Myth system. When you watch TV, your interface will be the Myth system and not the cable or sat tuner.
Points taken on the cost of components.
Not to belabor the point - but say I have cable. The cable comes out of the wall and into the digital STB. What comes out of the STB is up to me - it could be component video/audio, it could be HDMI, it could be S-video. OK. But let's say we take it out as coax. Correct me if I'm wrong but I would have thought that the channel selection has already occurred after leaving the STB and what comes out of the STB is not a multiplex of 999 channels but a single channel that can be displayed by a display device. So how does the MythTV do the channel selection that it must do to serve its recording function?
I'm really no sure on the details, but the Myth box will be your control point. It takes the signal from the tuner and takes over all control. How it does this I do not know.
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