On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 02:20:07PM -0600, Thomas Johnson wrote: > I'm thinking about turning my desktop into a MythTV box to play DVD > images straight from the harddrive. If you're *just* looking to play DVDs, then MythTV is serious, serious overkill. IIRC, it just calls mplayer, xine, or whatever other external player you've configured when you tell it to show a DVD (or any other video file that's not a MythTV-created recording of a TV show), so, if you're not planning to record TV shows, you're going to be better off just installing mplayer, xine, or whatever other player and just using that directly. Also, from a design perspective, mythfrontend is somewhat desktop- hostile. Its design is so heavily focused on being run full-screen on a dedicated box and managed with a remote control that it's clumsy to use in any other way. Running a myth client on my normal desktop system, I've found that it appears to have no way to resize the video window or toggle between windowed and full-screen modes short of stopping playback and wading through the setup screens for every minor change; it completely ignores all mouse input; and (under WindowMaker, at least) it always starts up with no title bar on its window, making it impossible to move the window without bringing up the window settings (via keyboard) and manually turning off 'disable titlebar' each and every time it's run. (Yes, this is one of my major pet peeves with MythTV... I absolutely believe that programs should concentrate on doing one thing well, but not to the extent of making it harder to do anything even slightly different.) On hardware recommendations, I can't offer any suggestions for a sound card (I'm perfectly happy with analog stereo, so I've never paid attention to SPDIF and have no memory of ever even hearing of TOSLINK before), but, for video, my dedicated MythTV box is using a plain old Radeon 9200 and I've had no problems with it, although most people on the MythTV mailing lists seem to advocate nVidia cards over ATI. -- The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened. - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)