69mb

I have a PIV 2.6GHz AOpen clone with 512MB ram and 160GB harddisk that had served me well for 4 good years as my primary machine till I went mac. It was either I throw out this faithful servant or find some other good use for it. Well that other good use for me was converting it into a mythbox.

I came across this article about 2 yrs ago and since then I’ve always wanted to try out the mythtv bit but with a shoestring budget and no spare hardware lying around I never got my chance. So when the machine became free and I realized that its just perfect for SD video(besides, we’re not going to see any HD here for 10 yrs most probably), I just had to do it.

Heat & noise are the main concerns when building a mythbox and if you’re going to be having the thing sitting next to the telly then aesthetics may come into play. Initially I had planned on doing a separate frontend/backend system with clunky pc1 sitting in some backroom and a neat looking frontend in a htpc case. Available funds quickly brought me back to my senses and I settled for having both the frontend and backend on pc1 and just focussing on getting the hardware I needed to keep it cool and quiet.

The stock cpu fan and the power supply fan were too noisy and just had to go. I also had to get a tuner card, remote control, ir receiver & blaster and the telly already has a VGA port so the only extra hardware I had to get was:

Thermaltake Big Typhoon CPU Cooler (product page)
	This thing is HUGE! Its 12cm wide and sits 10cm tall. Check out the images here. It basically looks like something that should come with a pair of ignition keys. I had to fudge the board around the case since the power supply couldn’t fit with it in the way so I had to punch a couple of holes in the case to move the motherboard a bit further down. Regardless, its doing its job pretty well and that’s all that matters anyway. The cpu gets to 47 degrees max compared to the recommended maximum of 67! It would run much cooler 40-43 if I had a proper tuner card that has an mpeg encoder on it but since I went for the cheapest I could get, I’m doing the encoding in software and that’s taxing the cpu a abit. The machines runs at a cool 31 degrees when idle. Its also really quiet. Its rated at 16dBA so its just barely audible at over ordinary environment noise.
Thermaltake 430W Power Supply (product page)
	Here I was just looking for a replacement power supply. The stock one was already dying and was noisy. Nothing much to say about it other than its doing its job well and quietly plus its got enough juice for future expansion.
Microsoft MCE Remote (product page)
	It was either this or building my own. Its an ok remote + receiver + blaster. I can do most of the mythtv stuff with it and its channel changes on the STB are working ok. One problem I have with it though is that it could use a couple more buttons(a separate menu key for starters) or maybe mythtv just has way too many key bindings
ePro Internal PCI analogue TV/FM tuner (product page)
	This thing is cheap and it sucks! I picked up form Bloomerg for just 1,500/-. At the moment I’m getting video from the STB via the composite video port but I’ve been unable to get the tuner working for the FTA channels. It has a philips tuner and works with the saa7134 driver and I’ve tried all sorts of modprobe options but I just can’t get the tv & radio tuner to work. Bah, FTA channels are completely worthless anyway other than for the first 10mins of news at 9 and besides there is the net for that

So far the mythtv experience has been great. Its great to be able to watch those Heroes episodes away from the comp, pause-rewind-forward live tv and stream recorded programs back to the comp. I don’t have any really exciting/unique screenshots so just take a look at the ones with the full feature list here 

What I have is the most basic setup imaginable; just a single tuner card and both frontend and backend on the same box. Its exactly what I wanted for getting a feel of the thing before putting in more cash. What I would like to do next is build a neat little frontend, get a bluetooth keyboard with built in mouse and dump the crappy analogue tuner for a couple of dvb-s cards.

 In a somewhat related story, you know you’re watching too much telly when you see this news title

and you’re wondering why in the world is Warner Bros advising investors on Kenya :) 

Trackback URI | Comments RSS