Revision as of 11:47, 21 May 2007

Introduction

I have been watching the development of MythTV from the sideline for a few years every now and then and have finally decided to put together my own HTPC. Below you can find the specs of my system (being build).

My HTPC system

Origen AE X15e HTPC (silver)

Case

I just ordered the OrigenAE X15e case for my HTPC system, which will be using MythTV. To match with my other audio devices I ordered a silver one (it is also available in black). As I do not like to have my TV on all the time when selecting a radio station or other audio to listen to I really like the build in TFT screen in this case. The case is made of high quality bezzeled aluminium and the current version (V2) can hold up to a maximum of 4 harddrives, one optical drive and a card reader at the same time. The case is a bit high but this allows for the use of normal PC cards to be used upright. For more information have a look at the OrigenAE website.

CPU

Harddisk(s)

To store enough data and have a fast harddisk I bought a Seagate SATA disk with a capacity of 500Gb and a throughtput of 3.0Gb per second. On top it is a very quite disk which is a benefit as I am trying to build a system that looks nice and is quiet.

Motherboard

I have chosen the Asus M2A-VM HDMI motherboard as at first glance it seemed an excellent choice as it had a lot of desired functionality build in, like a videocard, but also a HDMI and DVI output. Unfortunately after installing MythTV and trying to get everything to work it seems a little less excellent, mainly because of problems getting MythTV to work with the build-in ATI Radeon X1250 card, which as I found out is not supported MythTV. It has to do with some problem with the AtiProprietaryDriver which does not fully support the on board graphic card.

Tuner

I bought a Hauppauge PVR-500 tuner, as this tuner has two tuners and a FM tuner (but unfortunately radio does not seem supported in MythTV, perhaps something to develop for the future) and also has the ability to do hardware MPEG encoding which will save some CPU use.

Although I have some problems getting my videocard to function properly with my TV (which prevents me from watching liveTV and playing recordings using MythTV) I have already been able to record some episodes and the tuner seems to function very good. It seems to have a clearer image than when watching television on my TV directly.