So, I've got two projects and two boxes to work with. Looking for recommendations on what goes with what...

Project 1: MythTV backend / frontend w/ 1 PVR-350 w/ hardware {en,de}code, 1 HD-3000 HDTV card, and an earlier bttv card (requiring software encode/decode) for recording cable conflicts.

Project 2: Terabyte raid-5 storage box, hardware raid subsystem. I'm currently leaning towards using win server 2003 on this vs. linux, fyi.

Box 1: Dual Mobile Athlon 2400+ 35W (modified to mimic MPs) on a gigabyte dual server board w/ integrated 100mbit networking and 5 PCI slots (two are 64-bit/66MHz).

Box 2: Atlon64 3400+ on MSI board with integrated gigabit networking and 5 PCI slots (all 32-bit, bus speed options unknown).

Network will be gigabit ethernet. I can add a pci card to the box w/o integrated gigabit, but I understand integrated gigabit tends to work better due to PCI bus contention. Video card on either one can be FX5200s, I've got a couple. There'll be one or two other mythtv front ends on the network.

So...which box should be assigned to which project, and why?



-brendan

well it is indeed a though choice, but I just want to point out one thing. if you use the hardware decode portion and tvout of the pvr350 you will not be able to output your hdtv at full rez, cause it is through svid.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Question: Are you going to use the terabyte raid as storage and that the mythtv box is going to write to this? If so, why use Windows? Using "captive NTFS" you can write to NTFS, but I don't know how stable it is or how well it performs. In other words, you probably get better performance if you wrote to a FS that is Linux friendly.

Yes, the mythtv box, as well as other machines here, will be writing to the raidbox via SMB. NTFS-format storage is a requirement on the raid-box, and I looked at all the NTFS-options on linux, including Captive NTFS, and didn't feel all that comfortable using them for fault-tolerant storage. In fact, Captive NTFS was the *only* workable writeable-ntfs-on-linux solution, and the caveats and dependencies made me quite squeamish.

I'll be performing vmware-based testing and development on the raidbox for work, and it makes more sense in the situation to stick with what we use already.

If I find performance is very bad using the network-raid for mythtv storage, then I may relegate it's myth use as archival only.

-brendan

Good point. I suppose if I end up with good HDTV coverage here and want to watch it at high rez, I'll have the FX5200 outputting dDVI to a Dell 21" LCD as well, perhaps on a different front end, if necessary.

Considering I have analog cable (and a rather dirty signal at that), I'm going to be impressed regardless.

-brendan

If the raidbox is just for sharing storage via smb why the requirement for ntfs you can do that with any FS. also vmware runs just fine on linux. I have vmware one of my workstations running winxp on top of ext3.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Other reasons are:

1) comfort level on configuration and recovery options.

2) Limited use as a DAW - I've got scores of live DATs I've recorded that I need to convert over to WAV files, do some EQ work on, and track to CDs and mp3s (for my own use). The workstation that I used to do that on is dead. I use audio-extract-capable modified firmware on my SCSI DAT drives to pull down at 2.2x, and DAT2WAV to do it, which has some features I can't live without. I'm also more familiar with the windows audio apps. Also, for the audio stuff, having the storage local is critical when dealing with 3.3GB wav files...

Should have mentioned that up front.

-brendan

I have heard that you need at least a 3GHz P4 to software decode HDTV and that there are problems using XvMC. I dont know if the decode software can utilize dual CPUs so you may well need the grunt of the athlon64 for the myth box if you intend on using HDTV.

It's a shame though because dual CPUs would be useful for transcoding or commercial detecting at the same time as high def playback.