Hardware recommendations for MythTV/FreeBSD

[Tobias Roth]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 10:27:29AM -0800, Drew Tomlinson wrote:
> 
> I've been watching this thread as I am interested in building such a 
> setup also.  Can anyone comment on whether the 350 offers any benefit 
> over the 250?  As I understand it, the 350 also includes a hardware 
> decoder for MPEG-2 playback.  Is this any significant advantage?  My PVR 
> will be based on an 1gz AMD Athlon.

yes, if you're going to use i8the tv-out. it's a very high quality tv-out,
back when i bought it (14 months ago) it was far superior to all other
available tv-out solutions (think gfx cards or via onboard tv out).

another advantage is that you do not need a graphic card anymore if you
plan to use the tv as your only output. this saves power, lowers heat
production and allows for mainboards with few pci slots.

of course there are disadvantages too:
 - no FreeBSD driver (yet?)
 - even under linux, the decoder is not very well supported, if you feed
   it any other movie format than what comes out of the decoder.
   it's however possible to use the tv-out without the decoder, all you
   need is a halfway decent machine (2k celeron works nicely and probably
   is even overkill)
 - no use for a hdtv

cheers, t.