In my mind I had more questions – would Myth work well over a wireless LAN? Would it handle HDTV given it wouldn’t have the overhead of processing it from a tuner?

So I did some tests. I grabbed my EeePC 701 with Ubuntu Hardy and the Array.org custom kernel, installed the MythTV Frontend from the repository and tried it out. I have to say I was impressed with the completely unexpected results.

Loading the front end and bringing up live TV was a little slower than on my quad-core desktop, but SD live TV ran smoothly and fluidly, and changing channels was reasonably quick too, but still slower than my quad-core. HD, unfortunately didn’t run so well. Unlike when tuning directly where you get only 1 frame per second, this time I got bursts of about 1-2 seconds of fluid playback before it paused and played again for 1-2 seconds, paused and played again. Clearly the little Celeron ain’t beefy enough to deal with it.

But I was doing this over wireless – perhaps the WLAN didn’t have enough bandwidth to handle HD? I shutdown wireless and hooked up a piece of ethernet. Same story, unfortunately. The EeePC 701 cannot do HD. Unfortunate, really, since nearly all my recordings are in HD! Never mind, it’s still useful for watching random live TV in bed on the sidetable!

I recorded a video demonstrating the MythTV Frontend on the Eee which you can view it here.

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