An overview of my current MythTV infrastructure

I was replying to a friend about my MythTV setup at home and I realized that it's hard to keep things straight. So since he's been putting the details of his system on his blog, I thought I'd do the same.

I have 2 backends, each has 1 tuner. The master backend is running MythDora 4.0 on a Via EPIA SP13000 motherboard with 512M of RAM. The slave backend is also running MythDora 4.0 on a Via M9000 motherboard with 512M of RAM. The slave backend has a 1st generation Air2PC ATSC card in it and picks up whatever signals it can grab off the omin-directional pizza dish antenna from the roof. This includes most of the locals in Pittsburgh now and some of the locals from Youngstown and a few channels from the Johnstown market. (It varies a bit by season and weather it seems.)

The master backend (which has been a bit flaky especially when under very heavy disk i/o loading) has a Hauppauge PVR-250 and is connected to the S-Video output of my DirecTV H20-100 receiver. Amazingly, the H20 sends some sort of signal over that S-Video link even when I'm tuned to an HD channel. I know it's not real HD signal b/c the S-Video specs say that it can't handle that bandwidth. I think what it does is decode the signal and then down convert it to 720 x 480 while keeping the original source aspect ratio.

Both machines above have frontends running and are connected to 32" CRT TVs. The master backend machine connects over S-Video at 800 x 600 to a Samsung that can do 1080i. I'd like to connect to this TV using my master backend's DVI output and connect to the TV's DVI input. But I've never been able to get what the TV considers a valid signal from Xorg and my motherboard chipset. (And the H20's HDMI to DVI cable is plugged in here to boot.) However, I do know that this motherboard, when using it's built-in MPEG2 decoding support, can decode and playback either 720p or 1080i HDTV content and do it with very little CPU effort (maybe 30% max). I've done this with the xine included in MythDora which has support for the Via Unichrome MPEG2 decoder. (I use the following: xine -V xxmc -f )

I also have 2 Ubuntu 7.10 machines that have the frontend software installed. One is a laptop (old 700 mhz PIII Thinkpad T20) so it's like a portable 12" LCD TV. The other is a dual core Pentium machine that's in the office. It has Ubuntu with Compiz-Fusion and a very Mac-like theme and it can also decode HD streams with no effort.

I don't even use OS X but..

I'm in favor of having a Java 6 JVM on OS X because I don't want to ever have to think about whether some Java program will run correctly on OS X or not. So I support the 13949712720901ForOSX movement!