With hardware encoding and decoding for audio and video you can get away with modest equipment. Software encoding and decoding requires some pretty stout hardware, which of course costs more. Most of the encoder cards I looked at were either extremely expensive, not supported under Linux, or turned out to not have full hardware encoding. I eventually came to the conclusion that a Matrox TV card was not only the cheapest, but it also offered the most functionality. The only downside was that it used MJPEG instead of MPEG which would take up more hard disk space.
OK, but which Matrox TV card? They come in various flavors: G200, G400, and G450. To make matters worse, you can take a regular Matrox video card and add a Rainbow Runner Graphics card which supplies the extra TV and MJPEG functionality. And there is also something called the Matrox DVD Addon card that provides MPEG1 and MPEG2 decoding. First to be eliminated it the G450 variants becasue they don't really do hardware MJPEG support anymore. I also found out that the DVD Addon will not work on G400 or G450 cards, and only on some G200 TV cards. So I settled on a Matrox Marvel G200-TV. The last time I checked you could get them at CompuVest for $30.
Other than that, the other hardware is pretty standard and cheap. The only thing you really shouldn't skimp on is the sound card, as MythTV requires an audio chipset capable of full duplex. In fact, you could get away with a much slower system if you were to use a hardware MPEG2 decoder card like the Hollywood Plus (Dxr3), but then using the menus on DVD's becomes a bit of a challenge. You also might want to splurge on the quietest fans you can find, because it makes a difference. I actually dissassembled my power supply and installed a 24 Db fan.
After assembling the hardware I installed Windows, and then installed all the various drivers and applications. This was merely to test all the hardware to make sure that if I had any problems later on it wasn't because of the hardware. :-) After I verified all the hardware was working I wiped the hard drive and installed Mandrake Linux 9.0.
This document was last updated January 16, 2003.
James Bearden
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