[metal]

Hi,

I need some advice on achieving my media center goals.

I have an older PC (gig of RAM, AMD Sempron CPU, older NVIDIA GeForce2 card whose driver I got working with XBMCbuntu 11, 240 GB hdd) that I want to use as the media center. It also has a pcHDTV 3000 tuner card, which pcHDTV says MythTV supports out of the box (though I haven't had any luck getting MythTV to work with the card on XBMCbuntu 11 yet.)

My goal is to use this as a general media center for

1. Playing DVDs from the DVD drive
2. PVR on broadcast channels,
3. Recording and then playing back movies transferred from VHS tapes
4. Streaming movies from Amazon/Netflix in a browser
5. Playing native Linux games like Pingus, TuxCart, MAME, etc.

I've done some research, and I think what I want is a XMBC Frodo setup with MythTV on the PVR backend.

Does this sound doable? Is there a better path?

Is XBMC 12 on Ubuntu the best way to go? Should I wait for XBMCbuntu 12? Should I go for an older version to match my older hardware (not opposed to exiting XBMC to use MythTV separately)?

Thanks for your help!

M

[User 57826]

To use nvidia hardware decoding (VDPAU) you'll need one of these http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU#Supported_Cards

I would suggest running Mythbuntu 12.04 (at a minimum). Once you have MythTV configured and working, then install and configure XBMC.

As for the rest, it might be a bit ambitious with that amount of memory and CPU. I have a q8200 w/ 4GB of ram for my Myth-backend, and it doesn't always go as planned.

[metal]

So if I drop the live PVR part (a primary goal is to get rid of my kids' many VHS tapes; PVR would just be gravy), would I be able to meet my other goals? In particular, should I bother with MythTV for converting the VHS to movies on the hard disk or look for another solution? Note that I'm talking all standard def video here, no high def.

[User 57826]

So if I drop the live PVR part (a primary goal is to get rid of my kids' many VHS tapes; PVR would just be gravy), would I be able to meet my other goals? In particular, should I bother with MythTV for converting the VHS to movies on the hard disk or look for another solution? Note that I'm talking all standard def video here, no high def.

Yes, that should work, but I would still suggest you upgrade your video card to a VDPAU supported one. Having the video card decode the video instead of the cpu will allow you to use less cpu and ram than normally required. Especially if you want to ever add 720/1080 into the mix. You can always test it out with what you have, and see if it performs to your liking. The biggest benefit is just having the graphics card do all the heavy lifting.

As an example, one of my front-ends is running XBMCbuntu 12.04 on a Pentium M 2.26 w/ 2GB ram. It can run full 1080 with temporal de-interlacing without any issues at all.

You could always put that capture card in your computer, and connect the VCR and convert the vides using your PC (assuming you have a full PC, and not a laptop). I do most of my kids conversions on my PC, then copy it to the NAS on our LAN.