
beww at beww
Nov 10, 2009, 4:43 PM
Post #2 of 2
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On Tuesday 10 November 2009 12:22:38 James D. Goddard wrote: > On 11/10/09 9:29 AM, "Johnny" <jarpublic [at] gmail> wrote: > >> What is it that makes something "a great Myth FE box", as opposed to " > >> greate Myth FE/BE box"? > > > > The frontend priorities are usually, HD playback, small, quiet, etc. > > The backend priorities are usually disk space, disk I/O, CPU/RAM > > (transcoding, comm-flagging, database). The recently released nvidia > > ION systems tend to meet the priorites of a FE better than what we > > have had in the past and they hit a better price point. Having > > hardware accelerated video with VDPAU means the system can use a low > > heat, low power CPU (Intel Atom). So the whole system can be very > > small and quiet and still playback HD H264 material. However being > > very small and having a less powerful CPU doesn't tend to be ideal for > > a BE, but some make it work in very simple setups. > > I have a question regarding these Atom/IONs. > > I have a decent fe/be, and won't be changing it anytime soon ($$ and WAF). > > What I was considering was trying to buy an ION, perhaps one of the Revos, > or one based on the Zotac ION-ITX-F that has a PCI-e slot (if I can find a > mini-ITX case that has an expansion slot), and put a tuner in it as a slave > frontend. I am not entirely clear what extra services need to run on the > slave backend, if the master backend is hosting the database and storage. > Seems that for another few dollars, it would be great to be able to add an > extra tuner, and I have a cable drop already in the bedroom. > > Any clue as to whether they would stand up to a slave backend load? Probably, if you didn't push it too hard. The Revo has a 2.5" 5400 RPM drive, so if you want a lot of disk I/O you might want to use the eSATA port to add another drive. I'm curious why you can't just put the extra tuner into your present fe/be, and use a Revo-like device as a f/e only. As has been said, the ION machines are great as F/Es, and can operate as fe/be combos in very simple systems, so it should be able to operate as a slave b/e, especially if only one stream has to be read or written to disk at a time, and no significant transcode or commflag load is put on it. -- Brian Wood beww [at] beww _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users [at] mythtv http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
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