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Bad Brandar. Bad, bad Brandar.
My Hauppauge PVR 250 Model 980 is packaged and ready to hit FedEx sometime in the morrow. It’s cooler than yo momma and I am looking forward to getting my Linux PVR on by this weekend.
Many price-conscious TV tuner buyers might inquire, “Why not get some cheapass tuner and save some money?” Answer: Hardware MPEG2 encoding. This card actually encodes the TV channel into a compressed MPEG2 stream before it hits the mainboard. This can take a 70% CPU encoding load to a 5% load in no time.
Important, since my long-term plan for the Shuttle box is to serve as an application/file server in addition to its PVR role. The proposed layout (in three years or so) is:
- XP (no Longhorn, please) laptop on docking station
- Mac Mini
- KVM switch sharing an LCD and keyboard/mouse between the above two machines
- Shuttle running Slackware 13 (rough timeline extrapolation) patched to main television (otherwise headless) with wireless keyboard/mouse
- 802.11g (or modern variant) router/WAP
The Shuttle would serve SSH and X applications (via SSH tunnel) to the Mac Mini’s X server over the (hopefully wired) network. This lets me do all the Linux stuff I have learned to love without wasting a monitor (excluding a TV patch port) on it. Besides, much of the Linux functionality I enjoy is available from OSX (the GCC compiler especially). And a quick Google leads me to believe that the Gimp would work fine under OSX.
Tack the sometime-incoming DVD burner onto my Slackware box and I have a full PVR/backup unit. I’m hoping MythTV lives up to its favorable reputation and PVR’ing becomes the primary use of the computer. Then, purchase the Mac Mini (hopefully one or two or more versions ahead of Tiger) and use it as the primary desktop. This allows the laptop to gather dust and only do work.
Sounds good to me.