Grey
September 14th, 2006, 05:11 AM
I am currently an unemployed software engineer fresh out of university, so I am penniless, but I have been thinking about what to do when I actually have money again. One thing I have really been considering is getting an exotic mythtv setup going. I recently constructed a mythtv box for my girlfriend... She has a ASUS Pundit-AH1 that runs both the frontend and the backend, and it's working marvelously. However, I am thinking that I can do improvements to the setup when I build my own. The box is quite quiet, except for an annoying hiss from the power supply, but I think it could be a lot quieter if some more exotic hardware were used.
The thing is, the frontend doesn't need to be that powerful. It needs to be able to stream media over the network from the backend, and powerful enough to run some games ala snes9x. It needs to have "just enough" power. Which leads me to consider something very much like this (I might like to increase the network speed to gigabit and increase the onboard memory however):
http://www.glomationinc.com/products_9312-sx.html
Has anyone ever tried anything like this? Has anyone had any success with running mythtv on ARM hardware? Do you think it's powerful enough? 200MHz is quite powerful when you are talking about an ARM CPU.
I was thinking that I could install Debian on it, and I wouldn't need hard drives or optical drives. I could just boot the kernel from flash memory and run the root file system from an NFS share on the central server. The small form factor would be a boon in that I could construct a simple case for it, and just tape it to the back of my TV or something.
The thing is, the frontend doesn't need to be that powerful. It needs to be able to stream media over the network from the backend, and powerful enough to run some games ala snes9x. It needs to have "just enough" power. Which leads me to consider something very much like this (I might like to increase the network speed to gigabit and increase the onboard memory however):
http://www.glomationinc.com/products_9312-sx.html
Has anyone ever tried anything like this? Has anyone had any success with running mythtv on ARM hardware? Do you think it's powerful enough? 200MHz is quite powerful when you are talking about an ARM CPU.
I was thinking that I could install Debian on it, and I wouldn't need hard drives or optical drives. I could just boot the kernel from flash memory and run the root file system from an NFS share on the central server. The small form factor would be a boon in that I could construct a simple case for it, and just tape it to the back of my TV or something.