new mythbox almost complete

ok so i got most of the bits of my new mythbox togeater today,

specs are

athlon xp 2100+
512mb DDR 333
pc chips motherboard(cheep no major plans for overclocking and not using any of the onboard included features)
20gb HDD
liteon 18x dvd RW drive
10/100/1000 ethernet card
ATI radeon 6200 128mb card with VGA Svideo and Composite outputs
Sabernet 6 channel sound card with optical output
NmediaPC mutepower 400
Roswell oversized low noise heatsink
Athenatech A3701BB Black Aluminum HTPC case

just need to pop a pair of hauppage pvr 150s in this puppy and make it go.

so what do you guys think, by the way all video recordings and other files for mythgame and mythmusic are going to be hosted on my file server so dont concern yourself with the small hdd size. i also plan to get ATIs RF wonder remote for this thing once its all up and going. i was also wondering what distro do you guys recomend for running myth on. i was considering using Knoppomyth for ease of install but im not sure because i do plan to instal a few other apps on here.

Looks like a pretty solid HTPC rig. Have you thought about getting a PVR-500 instead of dual 150's? The 500 is basically 2 150's on a single card. That's kinda funky that you're hosting everything else on a seperate box. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work. Less you're trying to stream High-Def over wireless or something.

no im streaming standard def over 1 gig ethernet. as for the pvr 150's vs the 500 the 2 150s are actualy cheeper and in my opinion the drivers are better established for it which is why i chose to go that route. i think im going to try out knoppmyth and see how that works out for me. still open to distro recomendations.

The PVR500 is essentially two 150's on the same board... the drivers may be seperate file names, but they're developed and updated in parallel.... and should be the exact same. If I were splitting my tuners into 2 seperate PCI cards, I'd get at least one ATSC tuner.

If you check the reviews of the 500 on newegg some people are saying they are using a new samsung chip to do the encoding which dosent give a very good picture. That alone might be a good reason to stick with two 150's.

As for what os you should install it very with what you are comfortable with. I am trying to set up a mythtrv box right now in gentoo and was having some problems. If you are going to use gentoo make sure to stay in the stable branch and dont upgrade to udev 103.

well i installed knoppmyth on it just because i didnt have time to deal with potential dependency hell and its installed BUT 1 minor issue. i installed over the composite video output to my TV and when it rebooted i get up to the loader and then just blurs i connected it to a monitor its all there. does anyone know if knoppix or knoppmyth has a graphical tool to configure the tv output like several of the other major distros do? or am i stuck in text editor land manualy editing my xorg.conf?

ssjwizard said:

well i installed knoppmyth on it just because i didnt have time to deal with potential dependency hell and its installed BUT 1 minor issue. i installed over the composite video output to my TV and when it rebooted i get up to the loader and then just blurs i connected it to a monitor its all there. does anyone know if knoppix or knoppmyth has a graphical tool to configure the tv output like several of the other major distros do? or am i stuck in text editor land manualy editing my xorg.conf?

Click to expand...

Tried X -configure? Don't know how well it'll work, but you could try it.

ok well a bit of scouring through the knoppmyth wiki has lead me to my answers. not to complicated had to install the ati driver over the web from command line and set options using aticonfig also in command line but it worked out. my first real experence with wget and apt-get and i have to say they are quite nice if you know what your looking for. much faster and less troublesome than yast has ben. anyways its up and running and ive got zsnes setup. not much i can do with the system atm tho till i get some more time to setup my dvd playback and get my mp3s and such moved to my fileserver.