Need advice on my proposed setup...

[VulcanRidr]

Since I didn't get an answer on the mythtv forums, I thought I would post here. This is what I am proposing for my myth setup. I am completely new to MythTV, and wanted a reality check from the experienced. I am just coming off of a month and a half of being laid off, so I am trying to work on a shoestring. I'd like to set up separate frontends and backend, and I am wondering if my proposed setup is feasable. So here is what I would like to do...

Currently, I only have standard def TV, so I'm not dealing with HD. I have a total of three Hauppauge WinTV cards (two WinTVs and a WinTV-D). I checked in my junkpile, and i think I have a 1GHz Athlon board and an Athlon XP1600 down there, but not sure if either is good. I could put one of them together, but the boards only support a max of 768MB of RAM. On the plus side, I have 2 250GB and one 120GB IDE HDs that I can allocate to the box, and I can always add more capture cards as the need arises.

The other option for my backend would be a Dell 2550 rack-mount server. It is a dual PIII/1100MHz with 4GB of RAM. It "only" has a 147GB hardware RAID5 setup. The main downsides are that a) it is currently my VMware server, and b) it has 3 expansion slots, but the third one may be the RAID card, so I may only get two capture cards in there.

I believe three cards is the minimum I will need, one allocated to recording, and two that are on call for live tv. The two initial front-ends will be on my wife and my computers. At some point, I will probably set up set-top boxes on a couple of the TVs in the house.

The question I have for the frontends on the computers. Do I apt-get install mythtv-frontend, or set up myth in a virtual machine on each workstation? I prefer to do the latter, but when I played around with it years ago, I found that myth took over the whole X display. I want the TV running in a window.

So my questions, will the Dell have enough horsepower to do what I need to? I can probably upgrade to a dual-core setup with PVR-150s etc. at a later time.

Thoughts on my basic setup?

--vr

[adragontattoo]

Even the rackmount will be sluggish with all three capture cards in use more then likely.

Personally I would look to the wife and see if she will let you build a new machine to handle those duties. A new AMD Phenom or Intel i7/775 machine would be better suited for these duties IMO.

I built a mATX Phenom x3 machine for about 500 bucks and if you look around you can usually find a decent second hand machine for cheaper.

[VulcanRidr]

Even the rackmount will be sluggish with all three capture cards in use more then likely.

Personally I would look to the wife and see if she will let you build a new machine to handle those duties. A new AMD Phenom or Intel i7/775 machine would be better suited for these duties IMO.

I built a mATX Phenom x3 machine for about 500 bucks and if you look around you can usually find a decent second hand machine for cheaper.

Actually, what I would like to do, once we get caught up on bills from being laid off (and my new company not paying me for a month) would be to upgrade my desktop and take the Mobo, RAM and CPU from that for the Mythbox. (2.4GHz Allendale C2D, 4GB RAM).

But only after we have caught up...

--vr