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I've just replied to your motorised dish one then saw this post. your talking about 36w. im not sure where you live but energy is sold by the kilowatt. so to be charged for 1 unit of electricity your idle computer would need to be running for over a day. I run my own server 24/7 its a water cooled amd fx-85xx cpu 12 hard drives and a motorised dish and it doesn't cost a lot when left idle as hard drives spin down and my tuner powers down. have you checked how much power the computer draws when in sleep mode? waking up the computer could draw more power than you think and if its sleeping and waking a lot then it may be cheaper (and easier on the hardware) if it's left idling you'll need to check these out.
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Thanks for this, Gary.
You (as per my other thread on this) have persuaded me to stick with a single server rather than trying to split up everything necessarily.
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My setup is a RasPi 3 with a 2gb wd elements usb hdd (connected via wdlabs pidrive cable) and a technisat skystar usb hd dvb-s2 receiver. Watching, recording and streaming (even to a smartphone) works pretty decent.
Still waiting for tvheadend 4.3, wich hopefully supports hardware transcoding on the RasPi, so the 100mbit erhernet or wifi connection won't ever be a problem (even with hd channels or over vpn connection).
Power consumption isn't a factor with this setup.
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Joined: Mar 2015
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I'm a little late to this thread but might be able to share my experience.
I started off using Mythtv for years, with a combined frontend/backend, initially running 24x7 but then I configured it to manually switch itself on/off.
I then moved to a Mythtv backend with a separate Kodi frontend using a Raspberry Pi, this was a much better experience. Kodi provided HDMI-CEC support and was able to wake up the backend PC, I could ditch the wireless keyboard and just use my TV remote control.
Unfortunately the PC I was using was quite noisy and the Mythtv Kodi Add-on didn't provide the full Kodi experience (Don't get me wrong the add-on is great - I think the problem was getting the information from Mythtv to Kodi).
I decided to back the SiliconDust DVR on kickstarter and got myself a HDHomeRun tv tuner, the DVR wasn't that great but the tuner allowed me to drop Mythtv and move to TVHeadend, by using OSMC I was able to have a combined Kodi/TVHeadend Raspberry Pi 2 using a NAS for storage. I haven't had any problems using this setup, just remember to buy the licenses for your Pi.
I think Mythtv is definitely a more powerful DVR but that also comes with more complexity in setting up, TVHeadend was much more simple and can be run from a single Raspberry Pi. The recordings from TVHeadend can also be stored in a Kodi supported naming convention, providing the full experience. I did attempt to install Plex Server on the Pi but that was a bit too much and caused a few problems, I'm tempted to buy a Pi3 and split the work but haven't got around to it yet.
If you are running a Linux PC already and don't want it running 24x7 then I'd definitely take a look at Mythtv, but if you want silent running give TVHeadend a try.
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