Mythbuntu notes

Recently I came into possession of some used PCs from a medical practice which were built by the office manager rather than off-the-shelf equipment (they've since transitioned to the latter approach for purchasing), and after dutifully DBANing the drives clear, I noticed that two of them had superior specs to the two multimedia PCs being used in our household.

As Myth gets more complex and Ubuntu Linux' base requirements creep, we've noticed problems with the platform in a practical environment. Rapid channel-changing of live TV throws errors, DVD playback is flaky, recorded video playback has skips...

Not surprisingly, swapping the HD/tuner card/optical drive out to a faster machine with more modern memory seems to have erased these problems. In all fairness, I've been attempting this platform on some of the most challenging sets of specs (it's the economy, stupid) and when I started this project the Myth wiki was proud of how conservative its requirements were. Unfortunately Myth doesn't control what their platform runs on, and until there's an Arch equivalent of the Mythbuntu distro, they're at the mercy of the Linux ecology's diversity.

To put this in perspective, the first Mythbox I built (before there was a Mythbuntu) was a 450MHz P3/512Mb ECC SDRAM/200Gb Dell Dimension XPS T450 (which previous to acquisition was a Windows Media PC). The current backend/frontend is a P4M266A-8237 homebrew (thanks, lshw), 512Mb PC2700 / 2.8GHz P4 with hyperthreading turned on (which to the 2.6 kernel appears as two CPUs), and a PNY GeForce 2600 with 256Mb of its own memory.

This is the third box this backend has lived on, and the office manager who built it has a knack for gaemen which benefits multimedia platforms. Now, rapid channel changing is smooth, DVD playback is fine, and apparently recorded video playback is smooth too. The bedroom slave backend is a BrkdleG-ICH4, also using PC2700 memory.

It would probably be accurate to say that a good baseline for building a Mythbox is something built within the last twenty-four months or newer, and that perhaps there should be an update window of no more than one or two major Ubuntu releases.

It's a dilemma: there are always sweet, sweet new features in new releases of Myth but their dependencies can take you places your hardware isn't ready for unless it's pimped.