Right now (Jan '09) the frontends currently need more power than the BE if you do HD. But moves are afoot (eg Jun '09) to use the new nVidia HD capabilities
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If that pans out (and it will!) then a HD 5.1 Myth FE will run on something dirt cheap the size of a hardback with no fans and no hard disks.
Specifically, there are PCI cards available (yes, PCI, not just PCIe) with GeForce-8 GPUs on them that can do full hardware HD playback.
Couple one of those with a mini-ITX or nano-ITX mobo with a fanless CPU in a small case, and there's a diskless front-end client for about $200. A single MythTV backend server can support a multitude of those, limited only by network speeds. Notebooks also make good front-end clients where a huge screen is not required.
EDIT: within the next 12 months, we'll also be seeing support for Intel and AMD/ATI GPUs doing (mostly) h/w playback of HD in Myth.. spurred on by the competition (NVidia).Myth of course also has a full web interface, with remote streaming/download capabilities which will work anywhere, provided one has sufficiently quick internet connections.
We just need to get the hardware HD playback out of the development stream and into the the main stream.
Cheers
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