Navaho Gunleg

I recently ordered a new system to upgrade my MythTV setup. Currently, the back-end (i.e. the machine doing all the recording) is an IBM 300GL. Yeah it’s almost antique, I know, but it works. The drawback is that the hard-drive it records on, is actually an NFS mounted drive that physically resides in another system.

The front-end, another seperate machine, is a laptop with TV out. The laptop basically has the same drive mounted so it can reach the data. Watching TV this way obviously affects the speed of the network.

Initially, it has always been the plan to slowly upgrade to new hardware. First I had to find out whether the software (MythTV), the IVTV driver for the Hauppauge-cards all nicely play together. That was ‘Phase 1‘.

‘Phase 2‘ is to increase the speed and stability which can be accomplished by running it all on one machine in stead of three (the back-end, the front-end and a NAS).

I was looking at a certain configuration 4 months ago and the investment would’ve been about €696 at that time. (I spec’d an Asus A8V motherboard with an AMD processor which ought to suffice.)

I configured a system with the same components (with a faster CPU even) but, overall, the price has dropped to about €400 for a similar config. That’s a lot of money in a damn short period of time. (That means I’d get it even cheaper if I wait another 4 months, but I risk that the hardware is too obsolete.)

Considering this new machine will replace the old VCR, FM radio and DVD player currently in my stereo-equipment, a HiFi-casing just had to go with it.

Now I’m not only counting the days that I still work at my current employer, but also the days until this new system has arrived…