John Clarke wrote:
On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 02:05:37AM +1100, Jake Anderson wrote:
Jake,
Thanks for your input, much appreciated.
No worries,
you probably want a silverstone case. They have some nice ones.
They have some ugly ones too :-) I was thinking of buying an LC10-E.
I think I have the lc17, was one of the first ones they came out with I
think
I'm pretty sure I can do what I want, but I don't know whether I'll be
able to do audio over HDMI or whether I'll need to use analogue audio
for the TV. It doesn't matter; if I want good quality sound I'm not
going to use the speakers in the TV.
Many audio amps that have hdmi ports don't actually decode the audio on
the hdmi channel, just something to be wary of.
If you want quiet, ditch the mbo, cpu and separate video card.
the new myth out uses vdpau to accelerate video on anything that
supports it (> nvidia 9300 or so)
The card I'd picked, the GT220, supports VDPAU (VP4 including MPEG-4
decoding), but I'll have another look at motherboards and see if I can
find one with suitable graphics on-board.
Yeah it's probably overkill though and in my experince video card fans
make loads of noise relative to their size.
I have a quad core q6600 in it but I'd put one of the newer quad cores
in it now but its also my everything server (it has 6gb of ram and is
This is going to be running MythTV only, so I figured a dual core would
be enough.
should be, My dads TV was (until a few days ago) a P4 3Ghz with no vdpau.
Although if you want to run commercial flagging while recording you
will probably want one cpu per channel.
We can live without that. We're used to skipping ads manually, so as
long as I can configure a 30-sec skip button on the remote, it'll be
fine.
Only major upside to it is reduced disk load as it can commflag it can
do it without writing it to disk again.
Look also at tweaking the file system options so it'll use like 256mb
blocks, its not actually a block size of 256mb but you tell the FS that
it'll have big files on it on average and if your streaming 2 files onto
the one disk it'll help to stop it from getting really fragmented.
Wikipedia says that the GT220 is more powerful than the 9400, so it
might be able to handle it. There's also the GT240 (rumoured to be
coming soon), which has even more grunt.
I'm fairly finiky about it but it all looks good enough to me.
Too much CPU is barely enough :-)
heh, If your going to do transcoding that's pretty true, again quad core
will get you the performace for the price and thermal more than faster
dual cores ;->
Add another hdd or 2 because myth can use storage pools to reduce the
seek load when recording and playing multiple streams and drives are so
cheap these days.
More drives == more noise though, so if I do add more drives, maybe I
should configure a remote back-end? The machine I'd do that on would
then need some drives replacing because all of its SATA ports are in
use, and there's not enough free space to store much TV.
HDD's are pretty silent unless they are super fast to my ear.
A 5400RPM drive makes almost no noise next to the 15Krpm seagate cheetah
I just put into the missus PC ;->
Having the multiple pools will reduce the amount of disk seeking you
need to do and seeks are pretty noisy.
Also you can usually tweak the hdd's noise settings and put them into
quiet mode where I believe they slow down the seeks so they make less noise.
I'd investigate the possibility of sticking / on a USB stick perhaps so
that the spinning disks can shut down.
I'd thought of that too, but I'll get it up and running on a hard drive
first and see how much noise it makes. Our analogue hard drive recorder
is barely audible with the cabinet door closed. We can hear the drive
heads moving sometimes, but only when editing or deleting content. It's
damn near silent (apart from the cooling fans) when playing or
recording.
My feeling is that provided the thing isnt actually "loud" a little bit
of noise is ok, you can't hear it anyway when the TV is on ;->
I use a shintaro
http://www.shintaro.com.au/products/peripherals/14SH-KEYREMOTE/index.htm
I like the little Logitech diNovo Mini. Small is good.
I looked at that, I was going to get one but they were like $240 Vs the
shintaros $100.
BTW the shintaro can be recovered from having a bowl of stroganoff
dumped into it (If your interested).
I won't need to be any more than a few metres away, especially if I can
use the IR remote for most things.
I tried to get the IR remote to work, but by the time it got close I was
used to the keyboard ;->
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