On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 05:19:10PM +0000, Barry Samuels wrote: > I would like to get a Hauppauge WinTV Nova T 500 adapter which I > understand works with Linux. Unless they've changed recently, this card should work. It has onboard mpeg2 compression which means that you can capture on it with a pretty low power system (important for your idea below). ... > > My idea would be to assemble another computer using some spare parts .... > > I'm assuming that if I assemble the said computer with the TV > adapter in it (putting it near a TV aerial socket) and can connect > wirelessly to my desktop then I could access the TV adapter from my > desktop using something like MythTV. Would such a thing be possible? YOu can't connect to the card directly, so far as I know, unless you build some funky interfacing client-server rig... MythTV -- yes. Install the mythtv backend on the machine with the card and install the mythtv frontend on the box you want to watch. Should work great, barring bandwidth issues. > > I would be looking at a minimal install of Linux on the new box with > all the processing done on my desktop. frankly there's not much processing to do with that card.. it already compresses for you. But if you want to commercial flag, or transcode recordings, then that does take a little horsepower. Myth allows you to use other machines for these jobs if they also have the backend installed. YOu can configure the backends to be master and slaves. The master will control all the scheduling. The slaves just do what the master says: record shows, flag commercials, etc.. > > This would assume that I could connect the two boxes using nothing more > than a wireless adapter in each i.e. no router. My desktop has an on- > board wireless adapter and I have two spare PCI adapters one of which I > could use in the new box. Is it possible to get two wireless adapters > to communicate in this way? Would that be fast enough to cope with the > data from the TV adapter? I don't know. > > What sort of specification for the new machine would be required? I > have a Gigabyte GA-7ZXE mainboard which takes a Socket A Athlon (which > I would have to aquire) and it takes PC-133 SDRam (which I would also > have to aquire). What's the minimum RAM I would need? not much frankly. If all you're doing is recording shows, it's just an mpeg2 stream taken straight to disk. My rig with two cards has 512MB memory but hardly uses any of it. I think it would be fine with 256MB. > > I would also need to aquire an IDE hard drive. What's the minimum size > I could get away with for an appropriate Debian system? I run debian on a couple machines with old 4.3GB drives, but it's a little tight. > TV recording > will be done on my main desktop via the network. Well, not sure how well that works with myth. YOu could mount the desktop drive as an NFS share, but it could be a real bottleneck. Storage is cheap, stick a drive in the other machine and mount it as a NFS share to your desktop. That will keep you from getting IO bound on the recording machine. IIRC, the pvr500 has to inputs, which means in theory, you'd be trying to cram two shows down that pipe at once, probably not a good idea even with gigabit ethernet. > > I wouldn't normally want to use a screen or keyboard after the machine > has been setup - would that cause problems when booting? depends on the bios, but probably not. > > What else haven't I thought of? many things I'm sure. A
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