Article:  |
Building My MythTV Box, Part 1: Hardware | |
| Subject: | Price point | |
| Date: | 2005-10-17 12:51:05 | |
| From: | kmpatel | |
| Very informative article. I hope may people consider trying this project. The hardware configuration is reasonable, but the price is a bit hard to swallow. Similarly capabable non-HDTV :( DVR is available at significantly lower price. If you are spending $170 for a video card, consider the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 350 card, which contains hardware-based MPEG enconder and decoder. There some subtle difference in operation with hardware-based MPEG encoder versus CPU-based software encoding, but the CPU is hardly taxed. A significantly slower CPU PC can be used, greatly reducing the cost and generated heat (allowing passive cooling). Many people, including myself, have built a complete system with PIII as slow as 500MHz, and it works very well. My cost was roughly $230 (for the PVR350 and larger HDD), not including $50-80 (market value) of the old PC I already had laying around. On the otherhand, I have not done a side-by-side comparison between my $230 implementation and a $1000 version. | ||
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Price point
2005-10-22 21:43:45 Matthew Gast [Reply | View]
I wish I could use a slower CPU. I need the full CPU for playback only because the nVidia acceleration is not all that reliable on AMD64. If I had gone the Intel route, I could probably use a slower CPU just because my nVidia card would offload some of the video playback processing. (Why, oh, why, did I let my friends talk me out of a Dothan core?)
I'm willing to bet that the differences between my relatively expensive system and your inexpensive system is (a) I can record and play back HD, and (b) the hardware looks better. For many people, or for somebody who wants to dip a toe into the water, there is no need to build a system totally from scratch like I did.