[HH] MythTv server (backend) on an energy efficient PC

[Tom Metro]

Harvey Parad wrote:
> ...MythTV...on a spare PC to act as a server. Since the server will
> be on 24/7, I don't want to do this unless it's energy efficient.

Your question is welcome here, but you'd get a vastly bigger audience
and collectively more experience with this issue on the MythTV Users list.

I've been running MythTV since 2006, but haven't paid much heed to the
power consumption of the back-end.

One classic way to address the problem is to have the back-end power
itself down. There are various tricks to getting the system to power
back up in time for the next recording. Makes sense if you don't have
many recordings scheduled.

More recently I've seen reports that people have successfully ran the
MythTV back-end in a virtual machine. It may help if your tuners
interface via Ethernet (HDHR). This would make sense if you already had
a VM host running 24/7.


> Question: I don't think there is a MythTV for Androis (yet).

There are a couple of efforts to port MythTV to Android. But it's the
front-end, not the back-end.


> Could I install one of the existing MythTv (Ubunto???) packaged
> installs on an MK808?

You can get Ubuntu to run on some of the MK808-class hardware (I've
posted about that before. See the list archives.) So it should be
possible to run the back-end on such hardware.

Obviously you'll have limited tuner choices, with the lack of a
peripheral bus. As above, an Ethernet connected tuner is probably your
best bet.

You could also run into bottlenecks writing the video streams to disk.
You might want to record two streams while playing back a third. If all
that is happening through a single USB connected hard drive, that could
be a problem.


> Would I want to.. is there enough horsepower to run the MythTV
> server side.

The MythTV back-end is not exactly light weight, but it isn't a CPU or
memory hog either. If your tuners are modern digital tuners that hand
off an MPEG2 stream and you don't plan to transcode that to something
smaller, then MythTV is mostly just shuttling bits around.

Lots of back-ends have been successfully built from hardware we'd
consider pretty weak by today's standards - AMD and Celeron CPUs running
under 2 GHz and with 1 GB of RAM.

But those systems were used for standard definition video. Do you want
HD? Do you want to transcode? Then I'd consider something more powerful.

My starting point would probably be to look at an Atom-based (or mobile
i3-based) MiniITX board, or see if I could pick up a used laptop with an
i3 (ideally one with two drive bays or an eSATA port).

 -Tom