Our MythTV Box — the anatomy of a possible corpse
I’ve searched but found I never actually noted the equipment I’m using for our small under-the-TV MythTV box. I’ve got more than one reason to note it:
- Shuttle SN45GV2 Barebone PC, Socket A (uses an AMD CPU instead of Intel)
- AMD Sempron 2600+ 1.833 GHz processor
- Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM 512MB memory
We’re having some trouble with it, and I’m not yet sure if it’s the Hauppauge PVR-350 card or if the system’s motherboard is failing. For a good year I’ve found the system’s Ethernet port is unreliable; for a while I was using a USB wireless dongle, and then switched to a Linksys USB200M adapter (which sucks, crappy little plastic door thingy keeps the cable in—until your 1 year-old bends it til it snaps off, at which point no matter what effort and tape you use, you’ll not get the thing to stay connected). But in the past few months we’ve found sound dropping out, so there’s no sound watching live TV and some recordings are missing their sound. (Permanently.) I’ve restarted the NTL Pace box but it makes no difference. Only a system reboot actually corrects it.
Some friends on the MythTV-Ireland mailing list suggest perhaps the motherboard’s dying. Since sound on the system (aplay KDE_Error.wav) still works I’m suspicious of the Hauppauge card.
I’m just making this post so I’ve got the specs of the Shuttle box and its processor written down somewhere other than obscure email archives. Just in case. 🙂 Next possible step: take the PVR-350 card out of the Shuttle box and see if it works differently in my desktop PC. Problem is time to do anything like that. 🙂
