Difference between revisions of "User:Fall Line"
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I have had a Myth box made up of old parts for a while now, I built to try out an old TV capture card that a friend of mine was about to throw out. The SD recording straight from the cable worked really well, and I actually found myself using it quite a lot as we don't have any other recording devices in the apartment. I have a couple of major problems with it though, firstly, because the system was made of old parts downloaded HD videos and DVDs don't playback very smoothly. Secondly, the system has a very low WAF, without a remote and some of the setup being a little unreliable if something needed to be recorded I would always be the one setting it all up. | I have had a Myth box made up of old parts for a while now, I built to try out an old TV capture card that a friend of mine was about to throw out. The SD recording straight from the cable worked really well, and I actually found myself using it quite a lot as we don't have any other recording devices in the apartment. I have a couple of major problems with it though, firstly, because the system was made of old parts downloaded HD videos and DVDs don't playback very smoothly. Secondly, the system has a very low WAF, without a remote and some of the setup being a little unreliable if something needed to be recorded I would always be the one setting it all up. | ||
| − | So after I was happy that everything was working close to how I wanted. I decided to invest some money in a purpose built system, that for the time being at least, | + | So after I was happy that everything was working close to how I wanted. I decided to invest some money in a purpose built system, that for the time being at least, is based around the same old capture card. |
== Hardware == | == Hardware == | ||
Revision as of 15:14, 12 August 2010
Contents
Overview
I have had a Myth box made up of old parts for a while now, I built to try out an old TV capture card that a friend of mine was about to throw out. The SD recording straight from the cable worked really well, and I actually found myself using it quite a lot as we don't have any other recording devices in the apartment. I have a couple of major problems with it though, firstly, because the system was made of old parts downloaded HD videos and DVDs don't playback very smoothly. Secondly, the system has a very low WAF, without a remote and some of the setup being a little unreliable if something needed to be recorded I would always be the one setting it all up.
So after I was happy that everything was working close to how I wanted. I decided to invest some money in a purpose built system, that for the time being at least, is based around the same old capture card.
Hardware
Case: Antec Fusion Remote Black
Power Supply: OCZ StealthXStream 500W
Motherboard: Asus M3N78-EM (GeForce 8300 with HDMI out)
CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 7850 Black Edition (Dual Core 2.8GHz)
CPU Fan: Arctic Cooling Alpine 64
Memory: Kingston ValueRAM 2GB DDR2-800
Hard Drive 1: Western Digital 40GB IDE
Hard Drive 2: Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-ROM Super Multi
Capture Card: ATI TV Wonder Pro
Television: Samsung 32" LCD HDTV
Software
Operating System: Mythbuntu 10.04 LTS
Build
The build went quite well, with the combination of the power supply, case and motherboard. There was a couple of tricky bits, attaching the 4-pin 12V ATX connection was a stretch as the cable out from the PSU and connector on the motherboard were on completely opposite sides (I may try to get an extension at some point and run the cable around the edges. Also the IDE connector on the motherboard faced sideways on one side of the motherboard rather than up, and because of the chamber structure of the case it was a bit tight getting the IDE hard drive connector in with out removing the motherboard again. Everything else went very well, the motherboard has all the necessary connectors for the case's front ports and extras (audio, USB, LCD and IR). I still need to tidy up the cables a little bit to ensure they don't interfere with the fans.
When I turned the system on for the first time I was happy that even with all 4 fans (2 Case, 1 PSU & 1 CPU) running the whole thing was very quiet, the rubber dampening around the case for the hard drives and PSU appear to work very well.
Installation
I had a good experience using Mythbuntu for the old system, so I downloaded the latest release version (10.04 Lucid Lynx) and installed the OS on the 40GB hard drive, using the whole disk. I like the fact that Mythbuntu includes the NVidia drivers (which picked up the on-board 8300 immediately), Samba and VNC server. Next I formatted and mounted the 1TB hard drive to /mythtv, this is where I planned to put all my media files instead of the default /var/lib/mythtv.
