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Those that are thought of as computer savvy (geeks) concepts such as Tivo are enticing, but the limitations of a such a 'closed' retail product are shunned. Some choose to create thier own for financial reasons saving about 40% of the cost of Tivo hardware and subscription costs, others build in order to obtain addition features not available to a 'stock' Tivo.
I am a member of the latter group.
above we see the retail boxes, for a while I was not having much luck with motherboards (soyo comes to mind). Then a freind pointed me toward Giga-byte, and i've never looked back :-). Also notice the SilenX power supply. One of the goals of this project was to make this PC quiet enough for living room occupancy - so i paid extra for the power supply, and choose a quiet manufacturer, Seagate, for the hard disk. Another goal was to have the PC 'blend in' (ie not look out a place - beige boc et all) thus the Ahanic (read: EXPENSIVE) case.
Here are most of the components unboxed. Since I went with a snazzy case, I went ahead and got a VFD dispaly also (seen sitting ontop of the case in the picture above). An AMD chip of course, and decided to try a standard CPU cooler and got it packaged in with the CPU / MB to save some cash.
Even though this is a fairsized case, Space got pretty tight pretty quick! The hard disks and the large Haupauge tuner card have no space for example. I chose a WinTV 350 - which also has an FM tuner along with the NTSC tuner, and an NTSC decoder. I later found that the FM tuner is larger unsupported in the non-windows market, and the decoder while supported is not well supported, and thus should have probably gotten a WinTV 250...oh well, something to play with later :-).
another view mostly from the front
A rear view. Notice the cable going through one of the case fan slots, this is for the Infra Red. Behing the glass plate on the front I mounted the VFD, a blue HDD LED, and the IR receiver that came with the WinTV card.
Quick Specs:
Athlon XP 2800
512 MB Samsung RAM
Seagate 160 GB
NVidia GeForce 4 (5200? i think?)
Nvidia has good linux support!
Gigabyte Motherboard (onboard 5.1 sound)
existing DVD rom
(beige, but the case has a metal flip cover over it)
Haupauge WinTV 350
Existing Logitech Wireless Keyboard / mouse
ADDED: 2x 250 GB Seagate HDD
ADDED: Haupauge WinTV 250
ADDED: pcHDTV HD-3000 HDTV tuner
Notes:
I started with mandrake (this was about 9.0 time) but found that Mandrake was not allowing me to use DMA on my hard drive, which is pretty desirable since each show will make a GB file pretty fast... but the real reason was the graphics card, Mandraks AGP handling just would not work with the nvidia drives (or maybe just my paritcular card) reguardless Mandrake was not working.
I've used Redhat in the past, so I figured I'd give Fedora a try. DMA worked out of the box, as did the NVidia drivers - good to go. So I download MythTV and found out I needed a software project called IVTV in order capture (MythTV doesn't do it natively ) so downloaded that and found out that in order to use I probably needed to recompile my kernel .
About this time I'm wondering how much more a Windows Media Center would have cost.
I finally get my WinTV 350 recognized my IVTV and do my test captures and playback. Excellent. Then i get MythTV installed and woo-hoo the cvs version has a little checkbox for the WinTV 350's decoder! But after some usage, the decoder only decodes MPEG2 files...so the mythtv menu, mythvideo etc all still go through the video card - which means i would have to switch inputs on my TV evertime i went from the menu to a recording.... I decided to forgo the decoder altogether, and use my graphics card's S-Video out - which of course was not supported by the stock driver, so off i go to download and install the Linux driver from nvidia's site....
A while later i'm reading through the NVidia linux forumns and i find out that the reason why i can't my driver to work is that many of the new drivers have broken SVideo support, so i find an old version, unstall the current one, install the old and viola svideo works. I briefly messed around with twinview to get monitor and tv at the same time.
Then I stumble across Jarod's Guide (which at the time was for Redhat, but is now Fedora Based). This introduced me to Redhat (fedora) verions of Debian's apt-get. I essentially started over using ATRPMS and apt-get, this was great. In a matter of minutes I had a new kernel, new IVTV, new MythTV, and ALL the MythTV packages - video, music, browser, etc.
...many weeks of usage pass....
Just to try it I upgraded IVTV and MythTV. Via apt-get, this was fast and painless. I think about 4 commands, and 10 minutes. nice.
Everyone once in a while the menu's slowed to a crawl, instpecting the system resources showed that it was using 100% RAM every time this happened - putting in another 512 MB fixed this issue.
The video paled in comparison to the quality of the video i had seen on when using the hardware decoder of the WinTV 350...some reasearch on the Internet showed that a VGA to S-Video converted powered by USB made by GrandTech was a good solution, and not too expensive either ($50 US Retail). So now as far as the computer is concerned all the output is going directly to a VGA monitor.
To further decrease the sound a replaced the stock CPU fan with a Zalman 6000-Cu copper heatsink, which can be used without a fan (depending on you CPU).
Updates:
After sucking a bunch of my CD's into MythMusic (5 or 6 GB) plus having somewhere around 40 shows at any given time (at 1 - 4 GB each) i found that 160 GB wasn't quite enough, so I added another Seagate 200 GB just for storing video. I used this as an oportunity to use the XFS file system (still have ext3 on the main drive).
Upgrading Fedora to new releases seems to be pretty painless, even maintaining mythtv's ontop of it. I've got from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 with very little hiccups.
Todo Still
Get another WinTV card (250) so i can record multiple shows at once
Get Mythfrontend running on my xbox
so i can watch recordings in another room
Code some software (possibly using LCDProc) to have my VFD work with MythTV
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