Mar 27 2008
recycling pc1
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.
