Here's a breakdown of the hardware I am using for my Myth network. It currently consists of three computers: a master backend, a slave backend, and a general-purpose viewing machine.

Master Backend
AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz
512 MB RAM
Big, honking disk for TV show storage
Crappy BTTV encoder (not really used)
OS: Fedora Core 2 w/ stock Fedora kernel

Slave Backend
AMD Athlon XP 2800
1.5 GB RAM
Relevant storage space mapped via NFS to master
Hauppauge PVR-150 encoder
OS: Fedora Core 3 w/ custom kernel

Viewer
AMD Athlon XP
1 GB RAM
160 GB Hitachi DeskStar
NVidia GeForce 5200FX video card (for TV out)
Hauppauge WinTV BTTV-based tuner (for IR support)
OS: Gentoo Linux

A note on movie storage: I've formatted the video storage area with a standard ext3 journaling filesystem. Despite warnings of potential bad performance due to long create/delete times for big movie files, I have yet to see such an effect. A 3-4 second delay is noticible when deleting 1-hour episodes.

I started with this configuration because I employ a Linux server at home with which to tinker. My personal primary Linux box is nearby the satellite receiver in my room, so it could be the slave server. (However, as I occasionally reboot into Windows for physics analysis stuff, it'd be nice to have the master stay alive!)

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