[mythtv-users] living room myth pvr

[Chad]

On 3/30/06, Timothy Waters <timothy.waters at gmail.com> wrote:
> What hardware would you all recommend for a small & quiet MythTV box to hook
> up to my TV in the living room? Case, chip, memory, tuner and output
> card...I just got a decent job and I'm finally going to have the means to
> build one and I want it to totally replace my vcr and dvd player and I don't
> have a lot of space.
>
> --
> Timothy Waters
> timothy.waters at gmail.com
> http://www.e-Waters.org
> 205-587-9001
>
> "It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of
> man." Albert Einstein(1946)
> _______________________________________________

Einstein was amazing, just got done watching a few shows from Nova on
PBS HDTV via Myth...

Anyway..

2 schools of thought here:
Small, expensive, quiet and somewhat harder to get working OR
Smallish, less-expensive, relatively quiet, and a little less work/time

Small,expensive would be your garden variety Via Epia with XvMC
actually working, which I haven't been able to accomplish yet;

Smallish, less-expensive would be your basic CeleronD 310, some cheap
motherboard with AGP slot, and an GeForce FX5200 to do the XvMC
output.

I chose the middle road and bought a 300 dollar setup that kind of
does both of these things:
Celeron D 310 Retail (the factory fan is actually fairly quiet)
Antec Minuet II (the case is a beauty and the case/PSU fans are also
fairly quiet)
512MB RAM (less heat, figure 512 is a good round number these days)
And a Biostar motherboard with a P4M800CE chipset on it.
The motherboard chipset is the important part there.  It's a Via
Unichrome Pro chipset.  Which means I don't also have an FX5200 in
that box, instead I'm taking the road of using the onboard video
saving me some space, heat, and possibly a fan (and a few bucks too);
but giving me a world of headache figuring out how to get the
OpenChrome drivers working on this newish chipset that is supposed to
have XvMC to decode the mpeg2, and ALSO have the ability to accelerate
mpeg4 video, meaning my Celeron will left to mostly just detect
commercials and run the OS (which is why I went cheap with a Celly).

So there ya have it!

The side bar is that I didn't use a Hard Drive either, I'm PXE booting
that machine, saving me more heat, no noise from an HD, and making it
easier to build more and have them everywhere.  No need for massive
power supply, or worry about power outages and getting UPS's for every
computer in the house (just 1 for the main PXE/Myth/Everything
server(s) and the front projector ;-] ).

Hope that helps.

Chad