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Maneuvering around the box wasn't bad - I was able to put in the old drive and fill both memory channels with two Corsair XMS2 512M PC2 6400 sticks without a single flesh wound. Putting in the CPU was another issue however - I was short a pin.
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I paused for a few days and ordered a 2.1GHz AMD Athlon X2. It was a 65nm Brisbane core and only consumed 45W, so the lower thermals would serve a Myth box fairly well. Plus AMD chips are cheaper than avocados right now... it was an easy sell.
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lircd actually worked without a hitch... the StreamZap didn't have any issues. Neither did the pcHDTV card - it worked out of the box as well. Things were going well, so I shoved the machine behind the TV, connected it via HDMI and went along my way.
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No, the big pain was XvMC. With acceleration enabled, video would playback (either live or recorded) for anywhere between ten seconds to five minutes, then send X into a complete CPU spin. I'd suddenly have 100% usage on a single core and a complete lockup of X11. X had to be SIGKILL'd - repeatedly - before things would stop spinning out of control.
Luckily I bought a dual-core CPU so I could easily regain control. No matter now hard I tried, however, video acceleration just wouldn't do anything but hard lock MythTV.
Finally I gave up and just told MythTV to use the CPU for decoding. This worked acceptably, even with 720p streams. The CPU was beefy enough - it's a dual core, dual channel rig that has the bandwidth. Just a shame that neither NVIDIA nor VIA were able to provide a chipset that would allow accelerated MPEG2 playback in Linux. C'mon - is it really that bad?
Now things are recording and playing back just fine. The vsync is disabled right now - so I do have image tearing during high-motion decoding. But hopefully NVIDIA's next round of Linux drivers will fix XvMC, give me accelerated video and take all my worries away.
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