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Madbones
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15 Feb 2012, 5:44 pm

Hey!
My parents are thinking about cutting down on their Virgin bundle. We have Virgin TV with broadband and all the rest of it. We dont want Virgin TV anymore because half the time, On demand doesn't work. The most stuff we watch on demand can be found on Youtubes OD service.
So, we have a budget of £130.
I have found this much for that (Im going to have to build it, but dont care):
AMD Athlon x2 2.2 with motherboard
1Gb DDR 2 ram (Going to upgrade to 3-4 at some point if needed)
AMD Radeon 5450 512 Mb HDMI.
600 Watt PSU.
320 GB HDD.
All this found on eBay, I know this is a good deal, but how well would it record TV programmes and things like that? (This all needs to be done under Linux by the way. Im going to have to get a Linux TV card).
I know it will do just fine, but its always good to confirm. I know there is a bit of a big bottleneck between the CPU and the GPU and ram, but meh.
I think I will install Gnome Fedora if we do go ahead and purchase the components.


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Daneeka
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15 Feb 2012, 8:10 pm

That setup would be overkill for a simple Arch+XBMC/MythTV installation. I know XBMC has a Youtube plugin, but I'm not positive if it can handle their VOD service.



Madbones
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15 Feb 2012, 8:18 pm

Daneeka wrote:
That setup would be overkill for a simple Arch+XBMC/MythTV installation. I know XBMC has a Youtube plugin, but I'm not positive if it can handle their VOD service.

You really think so?
reason why I thought it needed to be like that is because people always put ridicules components in their HTPC.
Ah, that helps then.
Well, I will probably use GNOME for the main interface now.
It looks pretty easy.


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?Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.? -Steve Jobs.


Daneeka
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15 Feb 2012, 8:24 pm

You can run a decent HTPC with an Atom/Zacate board, if you don't transcode the PVR recordings.

I plan on running my own HTPC with an XBMC distro on a Raspberry Pi... if that's anything for power requirement indication.



lxuser
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15 Feb 2012, 10:10 pm

Just be sure that the TV tuner card you buy has an on-board hardware accelerated encoder, because if it doesn't it dumps all the work on the CPU. For compatibility check out the V4L-DVB Wiki at www.linuxtv.org